At five o’clock I finally got up and went downstairs to read.  Patrick Lencioni’s latest book, Getting Naked, had been sitting in my to read pile for awhile.  Two and a half hours later the mice still weren’t stirring, but I had read the book cover to cover.  Why was I able to finish the book so quickly?  No, not because it was a picture book of people getting naked.  It’s structured as a first-person narrative, or as the author calls his works – fables.

“Getting Naked, I Recommend It”

When my uncle, Paul Vickers, recommended this book to me, he posted the following message on my facebook wall, “Getting naked, I recommend it.”  This led to several of my relatives to worry that my uncle and I had a closer relationship than any uncle and nephew should have.  I should note, lest a reader get the wrong impression, the only issue I’ve ever had with my eponymous uncle is his misguided beliefs about college basketball.  The first thing I did when I saw the comment on my wall was to search Amazon for the title, and order the book.

Now that I’ve read it, let me echo my uncle’s comment, “Getting naked, I recommend it.”

When Jack Bauer Consults for a Company, Every Competitor in That Industry Goes Bankrupt Retroactively

Getting Naked is written from the perspective of Strategic Consultant Jack Bauer.  Though he shares his name with the TV star, his mission in the book is far more pedestrian.  He is to visit a small rival strategic consulting company, Lighthouse Partners (modeled after the author’s own company The Table Group), that his global firm Kendrick and Black (modeled partly after Bain and Company) has just purchased.  What he encounters upon arrival at the smaller Lighthouse Partners is a complete culture shock, as the style of interaction at  is a big departure from the button down way that his global firm operates.

Playing to Win vs. Playing Not to Lose

Having spent seven years at global consulting firm Accenture myself, I can tell you that the approach used by the fictional global firm Kendrick and Black is very similar to the approach used by Accenture when approaching business opportunities.  It’s an approach based very much on relying on the strength of the Accenture brand, the relevant experience of the team for the project in question, and the assets that the team will bring with it from working on similar projects in the past.

Contrast this with the approach used by the Lighthouse Group, where the approach is not to attempt to sell the client on the capabilities, but rather to start consulting right away.  They show up, ask tons of questions, and give suggestions on the first day.  To do this, they  are required to strip away the fear of the company stealing their suggestions, and not hiring them.   They must make themselves vulnerable, naked as it were.

I think the most apt analogy to describe the difference in approaches between the two firms is the old sports adage,  ”Playing not to lose, rather than playing to win.”

The 3 Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty

Through the course of the book, Lencioni’s protagonist, uncovers three fears that prevent truly great service, and how they manifest themselves.

1. Fear of Losing the Business
2. Fear of Being Embarrassed
3. Fear of Feeling Inferior

Getting Naked in 12 Easy Steps

Then he illuminates twelve principles to strip away the fears and become naked as it were.

1. Always Consult Instead of Sell - Covered above, never go into a meeting preparing to sell the client on what you would do, rather just start doing it.
2. Give Away the Business - Start giving advice from day one without concern about not getting paid for it.  If the client is going to do that, they’re not the kind of client your’re going to want anyway.
3. Tell the Kind Truth - Don’t be afraid to tell the ugly truth, but do so in a way that doesn’t alienate your clients.
4. Enter the Danger - If a situation becomes tense due to the proverbial elephant in the room, don’t ignore it because its uncomfortable to talk about.  Start a discussion about the elephant.
5. Ask Dumb Questions - If you don’t know the answer to something, ask.  There are probably others in the room who don’t understand it either.
6. Make Dumb Suggestions - Even if those suggestions seem obvious, worst case you will get a good understanding either why the client isn’t doing it that way, and you might just stumble on something that dramatically improves their business.
7. Celebrate Your Mistakes - Call yourself out when you make mistakes, don’t hide them.  It will help build trust and rapport with your clients, as they don’t expect perfection, just honesty.  My younger brother Brian taught me this by example long ago, as he laughs at himself with ease.
8. Take a Bullet for the Client - If there is any doubt who is at fault, just go ahead and step up and take it on.  Don’t shy away from blame.  I learned this from my best friend Paul Straw who, while we worked together at a movie theater, would step up and take the blame for mistakes that occurred near his station, even though he wasn’t the one that made the mistake.  It made him the most popular employee at the movie theater.
9. Make Everything About the Client – No need for you to take credit when things you did went right, just focus on continuing to get things done for your client.
10. Honor the Client’s Work - Take an active interest in your client’s business, and why its an important business to them and their customers.  This means truly caring, not giving lip service.  This is something I try to do most of the time when talking with people, I try to spend most of my time asking questions, as I seek to get to know them.  You can see the difference in approach quite readily, just watch your interactions with your friends and family, and see which ones are more interested with what’s going on with you, or telling you what’s going on with them.
11. Do the Dirty Work – This is a really important one.  Many times you’re going to be asked to do something that you feel is beneath you, something that a junior member of the client should do.  If you just bite the bullet, and put together a simple spreadsheet, or create a presentation for the client, they’ll see that dedication, and feel that you’re truly on their side.
12. Admit Your Weaknesses and Limitations - This is a higher order than admitting mistakes. In admitting weaknesses you do an honest assessment of yourself and your company’s weaknesses before accepting work that you’re not qualified for.  Sure you can probably get it done, but the client would probably be better served by having a specialist in that field do it.

Getting Naked at Amazon

More great books by Patrick Lencioni at Amazon

No, I’m talking about Henry’s status as “Defender of the Faith” that he was awarded by the pope, a couple of years before getting ex-communicated.  See, I’m pretty sure that my sea change in beliefs around public education have undergone as fundamental shift over the last two years.

Defender of the Faith

If you had asked me two years ago, my thoughts on something as fundamental as school vouchers, I would have stated that school vouchers were the last thing we needed.  If we give out school vouchers, its going to cause middle class parents to opt out of public schools in favor of private schools, and with them the funding and involvement that has made public schools in the US such a success.

I also would have told you that I favor funding of public schools at a federal level.  The current funding level for most school districts is determined in part by the property taxes of that county, which lead in my mind to a downward spiral whereby the poorest areas received the worst education, and thus became more poor.

I was all for more money being spent on education, never voted against a school bond, always thought the best thing we could do as a society was to spend money on public education so that we improved our standard of living and our global competitiveness.

Hanging with Heretics

So I’ve been reading ideas and thoughts of those people most ardently opposed to the current system of education and government in this country.  This is something that I recommend to everyone.  How else are we to expand our knowledge and imagination unless we see what those heretics are saying about the things that are so fundamental to our existence?

To that end, I hang out with people like one Dan Moore who speaks more articulately and with more clarity than most of his fellow libertarians at the CATO institute.  We engaged in a vigorous discussion a couple of years ago as we debated the pros and cons of school vouchers.

As per his usual, Dan laid out his argument with the pedantic tone of a martial arts master, prompting all sorts of snide remarks about him, his mother, his lineage and his lack of poker ability.  At the end of the conversation, I was convinced that Dan had laid out a logical argument that school vouchers coupled with the complete ability of parents to decide where to send their children will lead to better educational outcomes for everyone involved.

Let me attempt to re-create Dan’s case here [Note: I have no idea how much of "Dan's Case" is just talking points from CATO or Cafe Hayek].

Choice + Vouchers = ?

Dan starts his argument by discussing the super rich, and how they’re going to be totally unaffected by the law, as they already are sending their kids to the best education that money can buy.  The education received by these preppies won’t change one iota.

Now lets look at those upper middle class parents, who when combining their relatively less disposable income with the school voucher, are able to afford to send their children to private schools that cater to the education that they wish their children to receive rather than just the education handed out at the public school system.

This is where I assumed the impact stopped initially.  Leading to my fears of a “white flight” from public schools.  Because my argument was that parents further down the economic spectrum would not be able to effectively leverage their voucher into improved outcomes for their children.

Then came Dan’s point that if you couple the school voucher with the complete autonomy of the parents to send their kids to the school they wish became more clear.  It’s actually this second aspect, the complete autonomy of the parents to send their kids to the school they wish that delivers better outcomes for everyone in the economic spectrum.

So lets say you’re a lower middle class or working class parent, and you don’t have any discretionary income to spend on top of your voucher amount.  You still want the best education for your child.  So you do some research into the schools in your area that cost the same as the voucher, and find what you’d expect to find, that is that some schools are better than others within the constraint of the school voucher cost.  So you send your child to the better school, rather than the one they would be enrolled in by default.

Recognizing that not all parents will do this level of research for schools for their children, as they have busy lives, and they are still trying to figure out how to clothe, feed, and give shelter in this recession (read: jobless recovery) to their children.  These other parents will most likely ask the other parents what information they have on the schools, and send their kids to the ones the other parents recommend.

In such a situation, bad schools will not have many children sent their way.  Without the voucher money from enrollment that children bring, these bad schools won’t be able to cover their costs will have to close their doors.  Thus the worst schools will be replaced with better schools.  What is a bad school and what is a good school will depend entirely on the definition of the parents themselves, as they ultimately control the voucher purse strings.

Martin Luther

Onto this new outlook, I began having discussions with one Alex Krupp, who suggested that I read John Taylor Gatto.  So I ordered a couple of John Taylor Gatto books from Amazon, Weapons of Mass Instruction, and Dumbing us Down.   First, let me say that you probably don’t need to read both books, and that Weapons of Mass Instruction is a much better constructed narrative, as Dumbing us Down is a collection of essays and speeches that cover much of the same ground.

Well if my conversation with Dan Moore, removed much of my belief in the public good of public schools, John Taylor Gatto’s fascinating exploration of the history of compulsory schooling in the United States removed whatever may have been left.  Now I’m convinced that home schooling our future kids may be the only way to raise our children to be citizens of the highest order, and to be truly educated (much to the chagrin of my wife, who thinks I’m crazy for doing such a complete 180 in such a short time).  But as is my norm, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

First some background on John Taylor Gatto, he is a past winner of New York State Teacher of the Year, and spent 30 years teaching in public schools.  It is with this hard-earned school credibility, that Gatto attacks the institute of public schools.

A History Lesson Worth Reading

It seems that the whole of society has been sold a bill of goods on the purpose of compulsory schooling.  In discussing the history of public schools in the US, Gatto points us to the original aims for public schools.  I would have expected something bombastic along the lines of “We are designing a curriculum to teach children the critical thinking skills necessary to lead the citizenry of this great nation.”  As it turns out, the main goals for instituting compulsory public schools was to produce compliant people who could be employed as factory workers eager to please, and hesitant to question management.

The specific principles of compulsory schooling beyond elementary school as outlined in Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education.

1. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.
2. Children should be made to conform as much as possible to make them more predictable.
3. School should determine each student’s proper social role.
4. Children should be trained only up to their proper social role, and not beyond.
5. Schools should label the unfit through poor grades, remedial placements, etc.  This is to be done in order for those unfit to be seen as inferior possible mates.  Eugenics…
6. A small group of elite students will be taught to watch over the larger population to keep them deliberately dumbed down, so that they won’t challenge the government or the corporate bosses.

Scary, huh?  Yeah, no kidding.  They borrowed many of the techniques from the Prussian military schools, which turned out soldiers.  This model works very well when building an army, where there are needs for people who will follow orders blindly, know their place, and have a small group of officers calling all the shots.  Then again, maybe not.

In WWII, the enlisted men had an functionally literacy rate of 96 percent, the recruits for WWII were educated in the 1930’s when compulsory schooling was just being enforced nationwide.  By the Korean War, only 81% were considered functionally literate (this equates to a 4th grade reading level).   By the Vietnam War the percentage of functionally literate recruits was down to 73%.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised having read the Principles of Secondary Education which didn’t include anything about reading.

Pulling that same issue forward, what we’ve done is elongate the schooling process in an attempt to compensate what is clearly not working.  Formerly, autodidacts in log cabins became our greatest presidents.  Today, we see advanced graduate degrees as a baseline for what is required to succeed in society.  All just culminating in critical thinking about one specific subject of inquiry.  We end up with more college graduates than ever, but a less dynamic economy due to the lack of independent thought.

John Taylor Gatto argues these points and many more, much more effectively than my blog could hope to, so I recommend that you go out and read this great book, and then pass it on to someone you know who cares about education.

“Paul,

You’re a true linchpin, so for you this book is an award, not a manual.  You taught me a lot of this long before Seth did.  Knowing you has permanently and immeasurably changed the arc of my life, and for that I can never thank you enough.

Butch & Sundance
Simmons & Gladwell
Pettengill & Hebert

You’re my hero, Paul.

Love Always,
Clay”

There are inscriptions, and then there are inscriptions.  This one just made me cry as I re-read it.  This incredibly humbling and moving inscription by Clay is the essence what Seth Godin is talking about when he defines a Linchpin as someone who creates art.

Art for Godin is defined as the expenditure of emotional labor, which is not required.  Emotional labor involves choosing to take the time to treat interactions as a chance for a genuine emotional connection.  This is where Clay’s gifts truly lie.  He takes the time to treat his interactions as a chance to delight someone.

One of the biggest things Seth discusses in his latest book, is why we aren’t always in the convention of doing just this.  Why we resist creating new things, giving gifts without an expectation of reciprocity.  Much of it has to do with the fear of putting our selves out there for criticism, or that the work we create will be ignored.  Fear as Seth discusses in the book comes from the oldest part of our brains, the part that evolved from the lizard brain.

This is the part of our brain that is closest to our brain stem that has for millions of years helped to keep us alive.  It has protected us from predators, and kept us safe.  Which is great and all, but we don’t a live in a world where our lives are threatened very often.  So when our fear responses are aroused, they are typically not useful responses.

I know that I’m capable of creating great art and do often bring great joy and delight to other people, but fear definitely can overwhelm me at times.  It helps to understand that when I’m feeling that I’m avoiding something, that I can just attribute it to my lizard brain and start getting engaged with the task at hand.

Acknowledging the presence of fear, and that it is probably not rational, allows Clay to create these true gifts like the inscription above.  Clay could have easily let a fear that his inscription would be missed as I opened the book, or that I would have found his inscription cheesy, but he instead chose to write it and put it out there in the world.  This is what an artist does, he invest emotional labor and then shares it with the world.

I was going to lead this post with some tired Shakespeare quote about roses, but frankly, that quote gets too much pub as it is, and I wanted to differentiate this entry from the myriad of other entries on naming.  Just as the branding company Igor does with their naming guide Building the Perfect Beast.  I mean talk about a great name for naming, Building the Perfect Beast. Right at the heart of it, I feel intrigued, and interested.

So let’s look at the contents of Building the Perfect Beast, and see if it holds up to the naming strategies outlined by Igor.  So there are 6 steps to Name creations per the Igor process, and there are 3 ways to evaluate the names that are developed.  Hmm, sounds a bit sketch already, but lets give them some run, because if a formula can come up with the names Igor and Building the Perfect Beast, there might be something to it.

Step 1 Cut a hole in a box Competitive Analysis

Ok, so what are the Building the Perfect Beast competitors?  Simple Google search on naming guide produced

• Baby Name Guide Not a competitor clearly
• Business Name Guide  from a site called BusinessNameGuide.com
• Product Naming Guide looked like a competitor until I clicked in and found it was an analytics company recently acquired by IBM

Step 2 Positioning

So how does Building the Perfect Beast position Igor’s thought leadership?  I think we’ve got a couple of great things here.  First is the word “perfect” which denotes that what this guide will do for you is create something that is exactly what you want.  The second is the word “beast” meaning that you are creating something living and breathing, and connotes something that may be pissed off and ready to kick a little ass.  Isn’t this what you want with your company name?  Finally, I’ll touch on the first word “building”, which indicates there should be a process here, that one creates by putting things together constructively.  Now contrast that with the positioning of Business Name Guide.  While Business Name Guide certainly lets you know right away what its about, I want to pick it up and read it about as much as I want to pick up the manual to my camera.

Step 3 Name/Brand Development

Igor breaks down Names into four fundamental types

1. Functional / Descriptive Names  (Subway, International Business Machines)
2. Invented Names (Verizon, Accenture)
3. Experiential Names (Navigator, Safari, Explorer)
4. Evocative Names (Yahoo, Virgin, Apple)

To Igor, the distinction between Functional and Experiential is the emphasis on the consumer’s human experience not on what the product or company does.  Per Igor, the further distinction between Evocative and Experiential, is that it evokes the underlying positioning.  This delineation is flimsily explained here, but I think they do a better job in the name evaluation process to fully bake this out. I will say that Igor is a much more evocative name that businessnameguide.com.

Step 4 Trademark Prescreening of Names

Just as simple and boring as it sounds. Interestingly, the name “Building the Perfect Beast” is a borrowed name from a Don Henley solo album, and I thought his solo discography was limited to The End of the Innocence. So I’m guessing this name scored low on that category.

Step 5 Creative / Testing

Start pairing the suggested names with logos, etc, to see what each idea looks like fleshed out. I have yet to find a logo for the Building the Perfect Beast, though I did find many images of the Don Henley album cover “art”.

Step 6 Names and Taglines

Start pairing the suggested names with some Taglines. Intriguing that Building the Perfect Beast’s subtitle is The Igor Naming Guide, which is much more descriptive than evocative in nature. I suppose though at some point you have to be descriptive if you want to be picked up by a Google bot.

And voila! You have a name, or something…

Naming Tools

Or a set of names you want to score against one another. The first step for Igor is the naming process filters.  Let’s try it to see what the name invokes…

Building the Perfect Beast

• Says we’re crazy scientists like Dr. Frankenstein or David Banner
• Conservatives may be offended in that only God should be creating living things
• Don Henley fans (I assume they’re still out there, how else does The Eagles Greatest Hits stay at the top of the all times sales charts?  Full disclosure: I think I own that album, and The End of Innocence, though neither are on my iPhone, and I’m not sure I remember how to work a tape deck) may be offended that we ripped off the name of his album

Oh wait, that didn’t correlate at all, lets try that again understanding how the name correlates to the brand.

Building the Perfect Beast

• different, alive, exciting, process driven, perfect results, ready to kick some arse

OK we got through all that, we’re good right?  I’ll let the immortal Winston Wolf of Pulp Fiction fame address that.

Name Evaluation

This next step is where the engineer in me comes alive, its a ranking exercise.

The categories are pretty self-explanatory, but Igor has all the notes you need, including the 33 of Rolling Rock fame.

Finally there is a taxonomy exercise, where every the names are displayed across the four categories of name type above (Functional/Descriptive, Invented, Experiential, and Evocative) and then ranked by engagement levels from -2 to 5.  This last exercise is designed to help out ones understanding of the competitive landscape within a segment.  However, determining the engagement levels must be part of the Igor secret sauce, as they give little explanation around what makes a 5 vs. 4.  I’m guessing its all somewhat subjective, but that Igor has some rules they use when advising their clients.

So, when going through this great document, I found myself thinking about the name of this blog, Cosmic Wanderlust.  I chose the name, partly, as I used the name as a part of my signature in my personal emails.  “Still suffering from that cosmic wanderlust” would be the last words one read in an email from me.  I’ve been thinking though, how good of a name is it for this blog? So I reviewed it in the context of the categories.

Name Type: Evocative or Experiential – I’m not sure which, but its definitely not functional, nor did I invent either word.  To me the name is Evocative, in that brings out in me feelings of constantly needing to stretch ones boundaries, and wanting to see more places throughout the Universe and learn new insights.  To others it may be experiential, as people may think of the feeling of wanderlust, the need to travel.

Competitive Analysis – What is the competitive landscape for Cosmic Wanderlust?  Good question, I guess that all depends on how you define the competition.  Always define your market as narrow as possible initially.  So, how many blogs are there that review non-fiction books about design, economics, and marketing?  Well, I just did a search for those terms in Google.

Here are the competitors:

• Business Week Book Reviews – Not sure if they’re a competitor, as they’re not even really a blog, but they do have all the requisite book review categories, and they have the Business Week brand behind them.  I wonder what the crossover audience is?
• Brandthroposophy – Say that five times fast.  Heck say it one time slow.  It’s a mouthful.  Its also the blog of Robert Kozinets, dedicated to “Marketing, Social Media and Research”  Lots of entries on this blog, and not all of them are book reviews.  I must say though, I do like the ones that he has embedded from Slideshare, presumably from students in one of his classes.
• 800 CEO Read – Ah yes, remember when things were named after 800 numbers right before the internet took off?  It always seems quaint to me when I think of 800-Flowers.  They’re also in the business of selling books, I’m not sure I’m the same target, I think they’re a little broader than I am.
• Prepare and Share - Well, a different take for certain, but many of the same types of books I like to review.  Prepare and share I think has a good name, but apparently its also the name of one of the blog author’s, John Steinberg, books.

I could go on, but the internet is near infinite, at least until I pare down the types of books I review.  In terms of other naming aspects, I think I’m pretty well positioned against my competitors from a naming perspective.  It feels less corporate, and more whimsical, which is what I’m going for here.  In terms of trademarks, I have no idea, but then again I don’t really need it as I own the domain name.  I’ve never tried Cosmic Wanderlust with a tag line.  Hmm….

• Cosmic Wanderlust – Exploring the Cosmos of Knowledge
• Cosmic Wanderlust – Sure John Glenn is more qualified, but has he read The Black Swan?
• Cosmic Wanderlust – Self-awarely self-indulgent
• Cosmic Wanderlust – Blog on Books
• Cosmic Wanderlust – A journey shared

I see now why I don’t have a tagline for this blog.

Happy Naming

It’s becoming more and more evident to me that I should have gone to design school instead of engineering school.  Not that I didn’t love engineering school, ok maybe I didn’t love Dr. Royster (Vibrations) and Dr. Kleinstreuer’s (Fluid Mechanics) classes, but it just seems to me that all the design principles I’ve been learning of late are serving me very well in my day to day work.  Design is going into everything I do, its all about putting thought into the why and the how of every task.  I must say I’m truly loving putting thought into every aspect of what I’m doing professionally.

I’ve been looking at various sources for design inspiration, and Universal Principles of Design is the perfect introductory book.  It contains a two page spread on each of 100 (125 in the latest revised and updated edition) design principles listed in alphabetical order.  Each principle has a two-page spread dedicated to it.  A brief overview of the design principle is written on the left hand page, and a series of examples are visually depicted on the right hand page.

The great thing about the design of this book is that its easy to browse if you just want to look at the right hand side of each principle, and get a good sense of the principles themselves.  That’s what I did my first time through the book.  My second trip through the book found me reading each principle in detail, and that’s when I discovered the great use of inline side notes.

Inline side notes appear as typical foot notes in the text body.  The inline side notes themselves appear just to the right of the text.  This placement makes the notes much easier to reference, and the contents of the notes are great.  They aren’t simply esoteric bits of knowledge, but jumping in points for texts that delve into the principle in depth, either the seminal work on the principle or a modern survey of the principle.

Some of my favorite principles:

• Aesthetic – Usability Effect – Aesthetic designs are perceived as easier to use than less aesthetic designs.
• Affordance – A property in which the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function.  (Think of a handle affording pulling, but not pushing.  So if you have a door that needs to be pushed, placing flat plate on the door will afford pushing much more than a handle, and therefore reduce user error).
• Constraint – A method of limiting the actions that can be performed on a system (Think of the 0 to 10 dials of most amplifiers, restricting the actions of the user, as opposed to the Spinal Tap dial which goes to 11).
• Fitts’ Law – The time required to move to a target is a function of the target size and distance to the target.  (Think of trying to click on something on a computer screen.  It turns out that there are two parts to acquiring a target, first is the large ballistic movement required to get to the general area, and then a series of homing movements to get specifically to the target.  Homing takes the most time, so if you can make the targets larger, you will reduce the time it takes to acquire the target.  Buttons in the corner of a computer screen will take on effectively infinite height and width as the cursor will stop at the edge of the screen).
• Interference Effects – A phenomenon in which mental processing is made slower and less accurate by competing mental processes.  (Think of what happens when something is colored green, but reads “Stop”).
• Progressive Disclosure – A strategy for managing information complexity in which only necessary or requested information is displayed at any given time.  (Think of the More or Advanced buttons present on software displays to hide complexity).

Obviously this was just six of one hundred principles in the book, but they’re all great and explained very well.

Kudos to the authors.  You can read more about their projects at www.stuffcreators.com/upod

My good buddy Matt Cheney reached out to me to do an interview with Ramit Sethi who runs the site iwillteachyoutoberich.com, who he has been working with on a financial bootcamp project.  I’d first heard about Ramit through Matt, who convinced me to buy Ramit’s book, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”. I did so, ordering it through Amazon, and letting it sit on my shelf for a couple of months, as I was just recovering from all the books I  read for the Alt-MBA program that we were just wrapping up.  I figured I get to the book eventually.

Speaking of Indians and books, my good friend and former colleague Manish Kumar has started a very interesting project back in India.  He’s started what I can only call a NetFlix for Books called Friends of Books.  If you’re reading this from India, I think its a great way to get books delivered to you.

http://www.friendsofbooks.com/

Nancy was nice enough to do an interview with me about her book and her career.  Please see an excerpt below.

PP: Can you tell us about the first slideshow you remember?

ND: Aside from the filmstrips I saw in school, the first professional slideshow was when I used to sell heat shrink tubing for Raychem (sp), and I had never seen a 35 mm slide done professionally.  I remember I asked everyone after they presented there how it was done, it was beautiful. The reds were red, the golds were gold.  It had the product shots of the products.  I remember being really enamored with the slides, and nobody could tell me how they were done.  Then I started to do it.

PP: How did that evolve from nobody knowing how it was done, to doing slides professionally yourself?

ND:  We fell into it; my husband had a little tiny ad and it wound up helping build slides for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in 1989.  So we started right off developing slides, and then we got niched in slides.  We actually had a slide imager, so we actually did make the 35mm slides.  I had to wear the cotton gloves, and glass mount them in the middle of the night and produce tem, then we would FedEx them to wherever the executive was going to be.  We’ve lived a full life in presentations.

PP:  So these were with the slide carousels?

ND:  Yeah I still have my carousel. I use it occasionally during photo shoots to project weird things on the wall.

PP:  So you were using 35 mm cameras to capture images and put them into presentations?

ND:  We actually started with a digital imager, so we could output from PowerPoint and Persuasion and applications like that.  At the time we just lived in a little condo across the tracks from our current office.  We had a 35 mm slide imager.  It cost us $17,000 to buy this little piece of equipment to make these little 35 mm slides.  Then we had to run down to Stanford Mall to get the images developed into slides. It was crazy.  Then we would rush from counter to counter to put it on airplanes so the slides would get there the same time the executive arrived.  It was quite a process.

PP:  You’re starting professionally; you need $17,000 for a piece of equipment that’s a lot of money for anybody, particularly back then.  How did you make that initial investment?

ND: My husband and I aren’t real spenders.  So we don’t have a lot of things that we need on this earth.  So we put everything back in the business.  So when he started it, I was actually working full-time at a real job when he started the company.  I joined the company two years later in 1990. Every penny he made from the business he put back into the business.  Everything we bought back then was 10x what it costs today.  We lived so tight in a little tiny apartment.  We even rented out our master suite to my sister-in-law to help cover the rent.  It was a total bootstrap.

PP: So you guys are still close today I hope?

ND: *laughs* Yeah, we are, we are.

PP: How did the practice evolve from those days?

ND:  So I joined my husband in 1990.  I actually spent a lot of time trying to get him to quit this stupid idea he had.  I put a lot of energy into that.  He actually begged me, “Please just read a MacWorld magazine, just read it and tell me that you don’t think it’s the vision of the future.”

So I did, and then I made three calls that afternoon and we won all three accounts.  We haven’t had to make a cold call since, it’s all been word of mouth.  I called Apple, Tandem and NASA and we won all three accounts.  And from then it was word of mouth all the way up until the book was written.  And then we promoted the book, which wasn’t really promoting Duarte, it was promoting the book.  So it was kind of fun.  It just kind of perpetuated.

Once we got known for the niche, then people as they spread to new jobs, people kept calling and calling and calling for this niche.  Even in the dot-com crash, all our web and print work went away; our presentation work just kept calling and calling and calling.  It was clear then.  This presentation work is the real deal.  This is what we are the best in the world at.  This is what we are passionate about. So we dropped everything else and we only do presentations now.

PP:  So you started out a bit broader and then focused on your segment of presentations.

ND:  Yeah, and presentation that doesn’t mean PowerPoint necessarily.  It means on the web, on devices, on the stage, digital signage, any way a presentation needs to be delivered.  We definitely just do presentation now.

PP: How did you get involved with Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth?

ND: He’s a great client, we still work with him.  We were actually referred to him by Apple.  He had just joined their board, and they were originally supposed to build his presentation for him.  However since you can’t get products or services from the company if you’re on the board, Apple batted him to us, because we do a lot of work for them too.

We actually started with him for about 3 years before it was a movie.  He just toured around the country, passionately preaching his cause.   Then we heard about the movie, and we were shocked.  A movie about a slideshow, eh? *Laughs.*

Now he is just as adamantly out there talking and presenting it, it’s been very fun.

PP:  How were the working sessions on An Inconvenient Truth?

ND:  It’s funny I’ve had a range of clients, from buttheads to really, really bright people.  He is probably our most courteous and open-minded client.  He comes to us and says, “Here’s what I want to say, how do you propose I display this, how do you propose that’s conveyed visually?”  He defers to us as the experts.  Sometimes we get these 23 year olds CEO start up dudes that want to come and tell us how to do our jobs.  It’s such a play in contrasts for me, from a global leader you tell me how you think this should be displayed, to this kid who thinks he knows everything.  He just sends us gifts and cards, he’s just so… political. *Laughs* He’s so appropriate about everything.  He’s been just delightful.

PP:  You’ve kind of started a movement with better presentations.  You look at people like Garr Reynolds, and his Presentation Zen book, and you guys do things together all the time.  When did you realize that you started a movement and this community out there to make sure that bullets don’t kill not only people but presentations?

ND:  I’m so pleased; it really turns my crank to hear people say you started a movement, because that’s what we kind of started out to do.  I’d been holed away running the business; I needed to take some time to look around.  So I hired a president who took on a massive amount of my load, and that’s when I found Garr.  I dropped him a note, and asked him “Where have you been all my life?”  I thought I had been fighting this battle alone.  That’s when we decided to join forces to start a movement which has been really powerful.

So when I was looking around doing all this research, I found these young guys who were like, “Let’s start a revolution, let’s not do slides the way our mom does slides!”  And I’m like, “I’m old enough to be your mom, and I haven’t been doing slides like your mom does slides for 20 years.”   I felt like I was William Wallace at the end of Braveheart, marching and telling people we’re almost at the end.

So it’s good, its good seeing a tipping point, and what’s really amazing to me is that audiences are expecting more and audiences deserve more.  So what I see happening is a reverse pressure on the presenter to talk to the audience in a way that lets them know you’ve done your homework, and you’re trying to make something that is meaningful for them and doesn’t waste an hour of their time.  So the pressure from the audience is going to be great to see.  It takes more time and more planning and more thoughtfulness, but it makes a big difference.

PP:  Who are some of your favorite presenters, besides Al Gore and Steve Jobs?

ND:  I think most of the people on TED.  They’re some of the best in the world in short form video presentations.  I don’t know that they’re all fantastic at incorporating slides.  We’re working on a couple that I think will be fantastic, that aren’t quite done yet.  You know, I get asked that all the time and sadly I can’t think of one.  Also, there are no women who are iconic presenters, where you’re like “that’s the one”.  There’s only a couple who are truly iconic and use the medium well.  There’s the comedian Dmitri, who’s uses charts and he’s really, really good.  He incorporates his video or visual aid really well, its seamless, and it adds to the value of the message.  Bill McDonough is a really excellent presenter as well.  He’s the big green architect.  His work is featured in the book.  He does a fantastic job as far as using his voice and the media to really change the world.

I caught up with the author Chris a few Guillebeau months ago, and we had this podcast interview. I will once again credit Matt Cheney for his yoeman’s work editing this interview.

So to me there are two major points for you to think on as you read this guide:

1. What do you really want to get out of life?
2. What can you offer the world that no one else can?

When I first answered the guide’s questions 9 months ago, my answers were:

1. I want to create a world with more transparency.
2. I can offer fun with great effort, levity with constant persuit for better outcomes, open mindedness with strong intellect, questioning of authority with trust in others.

Revisiting this text less than a year later, I think I would ammend my answers to be

1. I want to be someone who gives his all for the betterment of the world in whatever form that might take.
2. I can offer my perspective, my skills, and my commitment to improvement.

Amazing what a few months can do to perspectives on things.

I would challenge you to answer these questions, so that you can align your skills and your goals to really create leverage and change in this world of ours.  Read the guide its a really short 28 pages and well worth the read.

Also, check out this great post by Megan Elizabeth Morris on A Brief Guide to World Domination.

All I ever wanted,

All I ever needed,

is here in my arms,

Words are very unnecessary,

They can only do harm.

- Depeche Mode “Enjoy the Silence”

How often have you felt this way?  You know you’ve got all these intense emotions that get brought to the surface, and you end up getting in an argument which isn’t what you want at all.  It was until recently that I started to realize my role in all the arguments that I’ve gotten into over the years.  I’m one of those sneaky poor communicators.  I seem to be really great at communication until you see me in an argument, and I don’t get in arguments all that often, so its rare to see me at my worst.  Unfortunately for those closest to me, I really do have issues with communication when I’m passionate about things and I’m trying to communicate.

Reading Crucial Conversations taught me two things, first that I’m not great at communicating when things are stressful for me personally, and two how much better I could become.

Let’s tackle the first issue for all you readers out there that think you’re the cat’s meow at this whole communication thing.  Take this self assessment test, and let’s see how you do.  Remember you’re taking this test honestly about times when you’re at your worst conversationally.

https://www.vitalsmarts.com/wheredoyoustand.aspx

I took this test, and again I consider myself a fairly easy person to get along with in most situations, and I got a 20 out of 35, which sounds decent, until you realize that 0 is the best, and 35 is the worst.  This was an eye opening experience to say the least.  Reading the book caused no less of an eye opening experience, as I started to replay so many of the arguments of my adult life (from once getting into it with a client, to arguments with my significant other, to arguments with my parents) over and over again in my mind in the context of my role in the conversations.  I was so bull headed that I actually thought the other person was to blame for the vast majority of the arguments.  With this book I realized all of the myriad of things I did to help the conversations turn into contentious arguments.  If I had better communication skills, and better self awareness, I could have avoided so much strife and pain, all while dealing with the issues that are most important.

Enter Crucial Conversations, an incredible book with techniques for dealing with these tough items.  Its a book I’ve now read twice, and I’ve read their follow on book, Crucial Confrontations once.  I still learn more each time I read it.  It helps to remind me to achieve a greater awareness of self during the times its toughest to do so.  I wish I could say that I’ve mastered the skills that are laid out in the book, but I have haven’t as my family and close friends can attest.  I have though developed many of the skills in the book, and I’ve also developed a new fearlessness around discussing things openly when I sense myself getting extremely agitated by them.  I know that if a conversation goes badly, particularly one in which my emotions or my counterpart’s emotions get out of control, that I can look at the mistakes I made while in the conversation to understand where I can improve.

Here’s a great presentation summarizing the skills and techniques in Crucial Conversations. This presentation was put together by the awesome Saba Long, as a part of the recently completed Alt-MBA program.

High Stakes | Crucial Conversations

Let me put some of the more esoteric slides in context for you.

Starting with the heart, means that you focus on what you really want out of a conversation. For example, I was having a conversation the other day about family possessions and where they might go, as parents were downsizing. I started the conversation not with “I want the table.” I started the conversation with, “I want this family to be closer and to have greater love at the end of this process than we did at the start of the process.” That’s what my true end goal was. It wasn’t that I wanted a table, even though it certainly was something I wanted.

The dual processing slide is another that is simple in its presentation, but profound when put into practice. Being able to think about a conversation, and what is happening to the tone of the conversation at the same time is profoundly difficult when the conversation has become tense or heated. Typically we are too busy trying to win the argument at the point it becomes one, that we lose sight of the fact that we’ve slipped into one, and both sides feel as though they have to win.

Creating Safe Conditions becomes extremely difficult once we’ve descended into the realm of argument. However it is sometimes possible to come back from the abyss. First comes apologizing sincerely. That’s something I’ve gotten really good at. Next is contrasting, which is another thing I’ve become pretty skilled at. The final thing is to create mutual purpose. This is one I struggle remembering to do every time, and when I don’t remember and push on to quickly I often find myself sliding back into contentious arguments.

If there is one thing I could pass on to you from this book, its the concept of the Path to Action. First thing that happens when you get upset, is that you observe something. The next thing your brain does once it observes something is to tell a story about why something happened so that it can make sense of the phenomenon that it observes. Then we have a feeling associated with the implications of the story that we tell ourselves. Finally that feeling then causes us to act out.

This can all be very innocuous, and typically is. For example, if you look outside and notice its raining, you will most likely tell yourself that this is mother nature running its course, which will cause little emotional reaction on your part, and you will reach for your umbrella. However given the same set of circumstances on a day in which you were looking to go sun bathing at the beach, you may think to yourself that its raining because the gods are angry at you, and you might sacrifice a small woodland creature, or just sing “Rain, Rain, go away, come again some other day.” Either way, faced with the same set of facts, we can interpret them in many different ways.

Well what’s true with the weather is doubly true of our interactions with other people. We often will have someone be short with us, and think, “He’s doing that because he’s a jerk” and then feel angry, and then treat him poorly in response. When someone is short with us, there are other possible reasons. Until we acknowledge that we observe a behavior and then develop a story around why that behavior took place, we aren’t able to truly see things from the other person’s point of view. This sounds straight forward, but its implications are quite large.

When is the last time you said “They made me so mad!” Well, in light of the Path to Action model, what they are really doing is some action which we observe, then we tell a story to ourselves to make sense of what they did, and then we react to the story we are telling ourselves about why they did what they did. This means that “They made me so mad!” should really be “They did something that I told myself was really mean to someone and that made me so mad!”

We all do this to some extent, otherwise it would be extremely difficult to get almost anything done.  Rather than think every decision through, we rely on rules of thumb to guide us on our way.  This works really well for us on tasks that we do all the time – things like driving, purchasing food, and engaging in conversations.  Where we typically struggle is with tasks that we don’t do very often – things like buying houses, deciding on our education, and writing blog posts.

We also struggle with things where we know the likely outcomes, but the outcomes are so far in the future that they feel as if they are outside the event horizon of the action in question.  Think about the effects of diet on your overall health.  You know eating unhealthy food will make you unhealthy, but any given single meal is unlikely to make a difference either way (given its not poisonous).

How can we get back on track?  How ’bout a little nudge in the right direction?  That’s the proposal of authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.  They call their philosophy for how to approach giving these nudges libertarian paternalism.  So the thought process is we give people the maximum amount of choices, but we also set an intelligent default.  So the default food for example if you were to get an order delivered would be healthy and well-balanced if you were looking to optimize health, of course the people could override the default if they wanted to, and order two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.

There are great proposals in this book, for smart defaults around all kinds of things.  Some of my favorites for general proposals are:

• Save More Tomorrow:  Default for 401k is enrollment in a single fund that is well balanced (per the “financial experts”) which starts you at a low contribution rate and raises your 401k contribution rate every time you get a raise (or until capped)
• Organ Donations: Default is enrollment

Here’s a great TED video by a colleague of the authors in the field of Behavioral Economics that discusses organ donations.

How do we move from acting only on behalf of our short term self interest (our inner-Homer) and get to acting on behalf of our long term self interest (our inner-Spock)? Well there are a couple of neat strategies that I like mentioned here in Nudge.

• Clocky – An alarm clock with wheels which launches off your bed to the far corners of the room after you hit snooze once.  Then you have to go find where it ended up when it goes off the second time, at which point you’ll most likely be awake as you’ll be out of bed hunting for the alarm clock.
• StickK – A website that lets you put up your own real money, which you only get to keep if you stick to your goals.  Otherwise the money either goes to charity, or anti-charity.

I think Clocky looks fun, and would like to get one at some point.  StickK on the other hand is something I started using right away.  I have a few vices that I’d like to modify my behavior around, and a few goals that I’d like to see me accomplish.  I set each one up in StickK to be monitored on a weekly basis, an amount to be given to my anti-charity should I fail, and a referee to make sure I’m not just mailing it in on my commitment.

Here are my commitments

• No non-work internet usage while at work ($100 a week to anti-gay marriage)
• My product status is green ($100 a week to anti-gay marriage)
• 4 hour turn around on all work phone calls ($100 a week to anti-gay marriage)
• No fastfood, doughnuts, or candy ($10 a week to anti-gay marriage)
• 1 blogpost here on Cosmic Wanderlust a month ($10 a week for the month following a miss to anti-gay marriage)
• Losing Weight ($10 a week to anti-gay marriage if I don’t stay on pace to be 185 lbs by Dec 4)
• No Su Doku ($20 a week to anti-gay marriage)

So, I chose the anti-gay marriage folks, as I am really passionate that marriage is a civil right, and that to deny it is a huge form of prejudice.  I know that I don’t want one red cent going to denying people their civil rights, and it would really eat me up if I had any sort of positive impact for that cause.  I also chose some large amounts so that I wouldn’t be tempted to think ah, no big deal if I were to choose to slip up.  How much is this total over the life of the agreements?

$6940 of cold hard cash on the line via my credit card.

You can follow my latest progress here. Right now, though two weeks in, I’ve got a 94% rate. (I forgot about the no candy rule after I had a few drinks and decided to go to the movies and ended up with some Twizzlers).  This means that I’m going to have to donate two times that amount to the other side to even things out with my beliefs.