When you get your hair cut, there’s usually a big mess on the floor when you’re done. The same applies when you’re solving business problems with customers:
When you get your hair cut, there’s usually a big mess on the floor when you’re done. The same applies when you’re solving business problems with customers:
The soda fountain has every choice you could want: cola, root beer, ginger ale, cherry, lemon lime, iced tea, even water.
My kids look at all that and make swamp juice.
What do your customers really want from all the features, functions, and best practices built into your product? A logical choice? No. They don’t buy that; they buy on emotion.
And free re-fills.
In your toolbox, your magic toolbox, you have wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers. With these tools, you can tighten, loosen, hold, and adjust. What more could you want?
In your world, your real world, you have an endless variety of problems. When you look at your toolbox from that perspective, you suddenly see that the screwdriver is a handy pry-bar and that pliers can hold the nut in place while you pound the bolt it with a wrench.
In your business system, your magical business system, you have products, customers, and prices. With these you can take orders, manage returns and issue invoices. What more could you want?
In your world, your real world, you have an endless variety of problems. When you look at your business system from that perspective, you suddenly see that the call center can help create leads for the sales team, and that the order system can hold inventory in place while you enter an order and schedule delivery.
Focus your attention on the business need and then see what’s in your toolbox. You may even find yourself saying “Oh, so that’s what this is for.*”
*I’ve got a drawer in the toolbox I inherited from my father in law that contains all sorts of tools whose purpose I can’t divine. When a fix-it problem has me stymied, I rummage around the drawer and sure enough, “Oh, so that’s what this is for.”
We’ve all been to a meeting or an event where a bit of corporate culture was born. Meeting catch-phrases and events take on a humorous life of their own and become a relationship link among the participants, becoming the stuff of legends. Konica Minolta’s commercials and The Office series are chock full of examples of this.
Though we try to boil down our messaging into catchy themes and analogies, there’s no guarantee they’ll resonate. So work with the audience to find what does stick. Corporate-culture themes can emerge in the midst of a presentation if you’re listening for them.
If an audience member volunteers it, maybe as a wisecrack, a comment on bullet point, or a strong opinion, positive or negative, of what you’re saying or showing, all the better. You’ve got something you can work with. Hold on to it. Play it up. Repeat it in a different context and in a humorous, self-deprecating way. If another audience member joins in the fun, you’re set, you’re immortal, you have been crowned a legend.
Two years down the road, when you bump into someone who was there, they won’t remember your name, they won’t even remember what you were showing, but when they say the secret catch-phrase, you’ll have a good laugh and an even better bond.
Early in my career, I read George Will’s excellent “Men at Work,” which not only made a baseball fan out of me, but helped me understand professionalism. Hard work, practice, and development of skills apply to talent-related activities, not just white collar careers.
Is a creative person talented or professional? Neither. Both. The creative person has a different end in mind. For example:
If they give you a box of Legos and you build the little space-ship or car pictured on the cover, you’re solving problems; if you take that same box of Legos and make a trebuchet out of it, you’re being creative.
You have the same ingredients, the same effort, but completely different goals.
We all travel. Now and again we’re challenged to save costs. I did some brainstorming and here are some ideas I’ve come up with:
It’s easier to edit than to create.
It’s also pretty clear that our peers in Marketing, Product Management, and Engineering have time on their hands to create, judging from the long, detailed, generic presentations they provide us. Let’s take advantage of all this raw material. If we know what we specifically want to say to our audience, we can start pruning.
Here’s a tip:
Open up your 127 slide master deck and grab a pen and paper. As you scroll through the presentation, jot down the slide numbers you find relevant. 3, 5, 7-10, 22, 30-34, etc. Create a new, customer-specific deck, and start copying over those slides.
The next hour or so can be spent adjusting (improving?) the grammar and phrasing of the copied slides to your needs. I’ve found that removing half the words improves clarity. Less is more.
Yes, there’s a completely separate debate about PowerPoints: Why not Prezi? Why slides with bullets? You don’t read presentations, they’re a backdrop; just use pictures. All that is fine, but sometimes a PowerPoint is a PowerPoint.
Let’s bang them out efficiently, shall we?
demos completed
cocktails at the airport bar
flights and the drive home
This is when it all comes together.
I have 44 minutes, a cryptic spreadsheet of 40 requirements, a briefing, and some customer knowledge to work with.
I’m going to mix it all together with some eggs, a demo, and a fresh powerpoint and bake a demo cake.
This is fun!
The other day my laptop crashed and I lost about an hour’s work* I’d invested on a presentation.
But did I really lose anything?
What I lost was a draft. It took me roughly twenty minutes to recreate what I lost, and it flowed more smoothly. What was necessary in the endeavor was to think, prepare, and rehearse.
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*This was a shock, as I have through the years developed a nervous “ctrl-s to save” habit with my left hand. How I went that long without saving is a mystery to me.