Planning, Startups, Stories

2 Rules for Ignoring Voicemail

Both of these should be totally obvious, but they aren't, apparently, because people frequently break them. 

1. If they don't explain, don't call them back. I get caught ignoring this rule, repeatedly, but it just doesn't add up. If that caller doesn't tell you what it's about, it's not that they've forgotten, it's that they don't want to say. They're betting that you don't think you want what they're selling but they will be able to change your mind. "This is Ralph Smith. Call me back at 555-555-1212." No dice, Ralph; if you don't have the courtesy to tell me why you called, I'm not calling you back. 

   I admit I've broken the rule a few times when the teaser is too much to resist. For example "I want to tell you why your business sucks" or "I'm very unhappy with your customer service" is hard to resist, but in truth, even those calls are blatantly unfair, obviously trying to force a return phone call. I've only gotten a handful of these in 19 years running a business dealing with something like a million customers, and I called every one, but not one of them was really legitimate. People who have a real gripe say what it is. People who don't say leave that out because they know that if they do, you won't call back. 

2. Even if they do explain, if you don't want what they're selling, don't return the call. In my case, that would be calls from recruiters, accountants, fulfillment businesses, or programming and development houses, not because there's anything wrong with those businesses per se, but just because either I don't want these services, or I already have a vendor. If the vendor calls you, unsolicited, you have no obligation to return that call.

Is it rude to not return calls? No. At least not in either of these two cases. And yet, amazingly, don't you occasionally get people who act like you were supposed to call them back, and it was rude of you not to. I know of one case in which a phone vendor making unsolicited cold calls called somebody back, angry, after she had quietly hung up on her. "Why did you hang up on me?" she demanded. Incredibly, that's a true story.

I'm particularly annoyed at tactics intended to either trick you or guilt you or intrigue you into calling back when they know you wouldn't. Oh, and those people who say they are just following up on an email they sent last week, or a letter they sent last week, unless they are really polite and friendly about it and they make it clear you're not supposed to call them back unless you want to.

Ironically, it makes me wish for the sentiment expressed in that most famous of all spam opening lines: "We don't want to waste our time, or yours." Prove it. 

The Six Lessons of Kiva

Guy Kawasaki picked up a great story from Stanford Magazine and added his own commentary, producing a post worth reading. 

Stanford Magazine has a terrific article about Kiva called Small Change, Big Payoff by Cynthia Haven. This is the story of how Matt and Jessica Jackely Flannery created it to enable people to make micro loans to entrepreneurs around the world.

The results are awesome: more than 123,000 people have loaned more than $12.4 million to 18,000 entrepreneurs. In fact, there so many lenders that there have been limits so that everyone can make a loan. The process involves reading a short profile about each entrepreneur and then deciding which to fund. From beginning to end, you can make a loan in under five minutes if you're a slow typist. Lenders do not earn interest though the micro-finance organizations that helped Kiva find the entrepreneur does. Entrepreneurs pay 99.67 percent of the loans.

I suggest you go over to the original post for Guy's six lessons for entrepreneurs: How to Change the World: The Six Lessons of Kiva

Mistakes About Mistakes

Can your business afford to make mistakes? Would you do that deliberately? Would that be a good thing?

Thanks to Megan -- my youngest daughter -- for picking this up this morning. Writing in the New York Times, Alina Tugend notes two recent errors that were basically inconsequential. "But they bothered me and made me consider how we are taught to think of mistakes in our society." Ignoring the possibility that this is a hidden message from daughter to parent (gulp), I also see a lot of business implications. And they aren't hidden. 

There's a lot of ambivalence around making mistakes.

On one hand, as children were taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison's famous quote is often inscribed in schools and children's museums: "I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won't work."

On the other hand, good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates.

We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.

The piece points out some interesting studies.

Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied this and related issues for decades. "Studies with children and adults show that a large percentage cannot tolerate mistakes or setbacks," she said. In particular, those who believe that intelligence is fixed and cannot change tend to avoid taking chances that may lead to errors.

Often parents and teachers unwittingly encourage this mind-set by praising children for being smart rather than for trying hard or struggling with the process.

Prof. Dweck ran a study with fifth grade children, dividing them into one group praised for good results and another group praised for hard work. The ones praised for effort were far more likely to take on a more challenging new task than those that were praised for results. Then in a follow-up task, a test that was way too hard, those who'd been praised for results were three times more likely to lie about a bad score than those who had been praised for effort. Conclusion?

"One thing I've learned is that kids are exquisitely attuned to the real message, and the real message is, 'Be smart,'" Professor Dweck said. "It's not, 'We love it when you struggle, or when you learn and make mistakes.'"

And that comes with some advice:

As we get older, many of us invest a great deal in being right. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, we focus on flagellating ourselves, blaming someone else or covering it up. Or we rationalize it by saying others make even more mistakes. What we do not want to do, most of the time, is learn from the experience.

I'll second that, but it's hard. I remember vividly the day my wife and I agreed we were sick and tired of the silver lining consolation prize of learning from the experience."  One of us said "Yeah, but I'm sick of learning from experience. Next time let's just guess right from the beginning."

The article cites Prof. Paul J. H. Schoemaker, chairman of Decision Strategies International and teacher of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who puts mistakes into a business context with an article in Harvard Business Review titled The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes.

The resistance to making mistakes runs deep, he writes, but it is necessary for the following reasons, which he outlined in the article:

• We are overconfident. "Inexperienced managers make many mistakes and learn from them. Experienced managers may become so good at the game they're used to playing that they no longer see ways to improve significantly. They may need to make deliberate mistakes to test the limits of their knowledge." 
• We are risk-averse because "our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes." 
• We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs. 
• We assume feedback is reliable, although in reality it is often lacking or misleading. We don't often look outside tested channels.

This makes a lot of sense, but I wish he'd changed the title. "Deliberate Mistakes" is a tough concept. My business experience includes 19 years running a company that's grown to 40 employees without outside financing, and I don't think we had the luxury of making too many mistakes, and certainly not deliberately. We were spending our own money the whole time. I wish he'd called it "Dealing Wisely with Mistakes."

On the other hand, one advantage of bootstrapping, and owning the whole company as it grows up, is the luxury of making mistakes. I've posted before on this blog the story of how Philippe Kahn built Borland International from zero to public in three and a half years by making a lot of brilliant moves that looked like mistakes at the time. If he hadn't had free reign -- this was pre-venture-capital -- he wouldn't have had that luxury.

Another thing I think I've learned, as the company has grown, about delegation: you're not really delegating anything to anybody unless you support them, after the fact, when it turns out they've made the wrong choice. When you bite back later on bad results, nobody will risk making another mistake, which means, basically, that you haven't delegated anything.

And, finally, in startups, small business, and entrepreneurship, fear of making mistakes can lead to paralysis. You have to know that you can never be sure when you're guessing the future. Don't get caught hanging back, waiting for more data, at least not too often. You have to deal with uncertainty in small and medium business. I'm certain about that.

So I'm not sure. I can't stomach deliberate mistakes, I am sure of that. But I still make the mistakes I make by mistake, far too many, and I hope I learn from them, whether I like it or not. 

Plan-as-you-go Planning as Dribbling

I don't like overused sports references, but dribbling is such a nice way to explain the importance of planning that I can't resist. Whether it's dribbling a basketball or a soccer ball, it's a matter of keeping your eyes up, watching what's developing around you on the court or the field, even while also managing the details of dribbling the ball right in front of you. You have to plan as you go.

This is a good way to explain plan-as-you-go business planning. You have a plan but you're also watching developments around you, revising the plan as assumptions change and opportunities arise.

What I particularly like about this idea is the sense of planning instead of just a plan. Dribbling is about constant motion, constant change, constant review and revision. So too, planning should not be constrained by the original plan.

I particularly object to the people who think planning is bad because having a plan means being locked in, constrained in your options, because you're following a plan. On the contrary, having a plan should make it easier to identity changing assumptions and to change that plan on the fly. That's plan-as-you-go planning.

Make Your Marketing Plan Matter

There's a good article on marketing plans by Matt Alderton appearing today on the Nielsen Professional Network Small Business Resource Center: Make Your Marketing Plan Matter.

"The benefits of having the plan is that it gave us a roadmap for budgeting our marketing dollars," Kirk continues. "It gave us a framework for making spending decisions." More than that though, her marketing plan gave Kirk a framework for making strategic decisions. It helped her budget not only her money, but also her time and her energy.

"Small businesses don't have million-dollar marketing budgets, so a marketing plan is even more important in order to make sure that efforts are coordinated and in the right areas," she says. "In order to be effective, you generally need to integrate your marketing efforts and make sure the right message is getting to the right customers. Doing that without planning it in advance is difficult."

Plans Beget Profits

Indeed, marketing your business without having a plan is like shooting a gun without having a target. Not only is it difficult, but it's also reckless, ineffective and even dangerous.

That's just an excerpt. I recommend reading the full piece.

Who Owns Your Information?

You Have No Rights on Facebook or MySpace or other social media sites, which can toss you out without a moment's notice. And you don't own your own information on those sites either. Digg summarily blocked a protest against Fox News, while courting Murdoch's NewsCorp for a possible acquisition.  And if you get email blacklisted by one of the email groups, spammer or not, you're out of luck for a long time.

Meanwhile, the Web grows. It's a new business landscape. You depend on it, I depend on it, businesses depend on it. We live in a world of downloadable software, Web applications, social media, green business, truths both convenient and inconvenient and every gradient in between. People steal my posts and put them up on overnight blogs to lure clicks on ads. And we have no rights, no due process, and no recourse when things go bad.

What to do about this? I don't know.

Have you heard the talk of an Internet Bill of Rights?

The Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights,  and similar efforts are about controlling the power of governments. Governments, however, can't control the power of the unbridled Internet. Can users? There's nobody in charge of all this, and, gulp, come to think of it, maybe that's just as well. Which government would be put in charge? Or do we leave it up to businesses? Gulp again.

Good luck with that.

The title of this post comes straight from Stu Phillips' You Have no Rights posted on Soaring on Ridgelift.   

If you look at the terms and conditions of social network sites like MySpace and Facebook, its clear that you surrender most of your rights when you click on the "accept" button that is required to get access to the service.

There is no appeal process for termination. The only recourse that you have under the Facebook conditions of use would be to sue for arbitration as detailed in the Arbitration clause.

Jason Linkins called his piece InDiggnation, in the Huffington Post. It chronicles the battle between an anti-fox-news site and Digg, with copies of emails. There too, no recourse is pretty clear.

Don Dodge asks Who owns your data on Google, Facebook, Netflix?

The blogosphere is raging about Facebook's use of "my data". Doc Searls is promoting the idea of VRM (Vendor Relationship Mgmt) and says "Time to write our own rules".

The bargain you made in exchange for free services. Consumers sometimes forget the bargain they made in exchange for the free services. Sometimes it means your personal information can be sold or marketed. Other times it means your content is not really yours anymore. Sometimes it means you get to pay for additional services once you are hooked. Or maybe that the rules change over time and the service is unreliable. Most times things work out OK and consumers don’t complain too much.

Are things better than they used to be with email? It used to be that you could be blacklisted on some major spam lists by anybody who felt like reporting your email address to AOL or other lists. No due process. It took months to get your email back. The ultimate prank call was to blacklist somebody's email.

Brave new world. Lots of problems, but I don't see any solutions anywhere. I'm certainly not going to stop posting, reviewing, blogging, and emailing. Maybe I'll just worry.

Ideas, Reminders, Planning Process

Flashback: you're sitting in the audience, listening to a good speaker -- a motivational speaker, perhaps, or business expert. You get excited by something they say, a good list, a useful tip, something you want to write down.

Think about it: how often is the most valuable take-away from one of these moments a reminder of what you already knew, rather than a new idea? Is this a common occurrence? Or is it that sometimes the best ideas are presented by the best speakers or writers in ways that make them seem like you already knew them?

For example, on this blog I've posted several talks by Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, and talks from www.ted.com. Those are full of examples.

Planning particularly lends itself to the reminder business because it is one of those disciplines that's more about actually doing it than knowing how to do it. True, there's a lot of writing and speaking about how, with financial projections and frameworks and lists and outlines. But out there in the real world, the biggest problem with planning isn't how to do it as much as just plain doing it. In this sense it's a lot like diet and exercise -- everybody pretty much knows they'd be better off, but knowing isn't enough.

In The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, author Patrick Lencioni quotes Samuel Johnson, the 18th century writer, who wrote: "people need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed."

I heard him in an interview at HBR Ideacast, expanding on that thought:

I think that's so true whether we're talking about managing and leading or parenting or marriage. I'm a parent of four boys. And I know what you're supposed to do to be a good parent. The question isn't can I intellectualize it, the question is do I do it every day, day in and day out. And so, my challenge is to keep remembering to do it and that I think is the key for most managers. They know this stuff, but when they ... until they read this again and they say: "why am I not doing this?" My book is just written to be a reminder.

Good planning process isn't something that happens once. It's a constant process. It's about developing a plan knowing that you are going to track progress against it, review it, and revise it. It's about developing management habits that encourage accountability and collaboration as part of the planning.

That seems to me to be something most of us already know. We just need the reminders. 
Schedule review sessions when you introduce a plan, and follow through with plan review. Don't miss the meetings. Don't forget to review assumptions every time you review the plan.

Rosy Monday is Strategic Planning Day

What a great idea! With all the talk about Black Friday for shopping, John Jantsch suggests Rosy Monday for planning:

For years I’ve marked the weekend following Thanksgiving with my own holiday I call Rosy Monday. Rosy Monday is the day that I typically take a good long look at what I’ve accomplished during the year, relative to my goals, and make a first pass at my vision for the next three to five years. It's my forecasting day.

Well said. I recommend you read the whole post at its source:

Rosy Monday is Strategic Planning Day | Duct Tape Marketing Blog

Being the Boss is Overrated

(I wrote this recently for Small Business Trends. I'm cross posting it here for your convenience. Tim)

Remember the Peter Principle, about people rising to their level of incompetence. There's also the Dilbert principle:

“The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.” — Scott Adams

This comes up recently with news coverage of Dilbert creator Scott Adams managing a restaurant. The New York Times story called it The Tables Turn for Dilbert’s Creator.  Apparently he's a better cartoonist than a manager.

“I’ve been in this business 23 years, and I’ve seen a lot of things. He truly has no idea what he’s doing,” said Nathan Gillespie, the new, wise-cracking head chef, after discussing a recent dust-up with Mr. Adams over the grilled salmon filet.   

Emma Lewis, the lunch manager, describes Mr. Adams as someone who should be shielded from tough decisions the way a crawling infant needs to be protected from household hazards. “We laugh and say we’re not going to let him watch the Food Channel,” she said. “He’ll think he can run a restaurant.”

And the man behind Dilbert does in fact get good reviews from employees for empathy and humanity and being generally a good guy:

In interviews authorized by their generously self-deprecating boss, employees describe him as trusting and appreciative, [although] full of off-the-wall ideas about how to turn around the business, and dramatically clueless about the harsh realities of the restaurant industry.

On the other hand, employees also say he knows his limitations and combines deep trust in them with an instinctive ability to motivate people.

In the meantime, though, the business he's running isn't doing so well:

While the chains have 30-minute waits for tables on weeknights, Stacey’s at Waterford has more jewel-tone microfiber chairs than diners, and is slowly but steadily losing money.

I think there's more than irony here; there's also a lesson about how things work in small business, possibly in all business.

• Does ownership make a manager? It obviously affects how hard one works, commitment, and loyalty. But does it help you manage people? Make decisions? Understand the business? 
• Does creativity make a manager? Is the best producer the best manager? A cartoonist works alone, a restaurant manager doesn't. How often do we put the best engineer, instead of the best manager, in charge of engineering? Or the best programmer, instead of the best manager, in charge of programming?   
• Is being the manager the best job in the place? I think some people are born managers, some are made managers, and some are happier and more productive as chefs, engineers, programmers, or cartoonists, or writers.  And on this point I speak with more experience, having just changed my job, which also ended up (good for my ego) in a story reported on the Wall Street Journal. 

Being the boss is overrated.

Can You Expand, Delegate, and Trust?

"Running a small business for the first time means lots of new challenges. What part of entrepreneurship have you worked hardest on?" The New York Times asked E.B. Moss, small business owner, in Small Business Owner Profile:

EBM: As a friend of mine once said, "you can be the best gadget builder around. But you can only build so many gadgets in an hour all by yourself." Learning how to expand, how to delegate and trust others is the hardest part. That, and number crunching!

She's a promotion marketing expert, and owner of Moss Appeal™ — a 'virtual agency' based on a consortium of hand-picked experts. Last year she established Moss Appeal Green™ to focus on promoting companies' pro-social and environmental contributions.

The Times interviewed her as the first in a series of profiles of business owners.

I really like her answer. We talk so much about the idea, the strategy, and the planning, but not enough about building and maintaining the team.

del.icio.us Tags: teamwork, small business, delegation