Not Haunted

Take a look at the pic on the right side of this post. A 'For Lease' sign spotted in the French Quarter in New Orleans the other day.

Pretty funny and clever bit of advertising by the leasing agent. It is always kind of refreshing to see something so familiar, like a 'For Lease' sign, taken in a slightly or even entirely new direction. 'For Lease' signs are everywhere, they tend to kind of blend in to the surroundings like so many other aspects of the urban landscape. But this one, with the 'Not Haunted' sign stood out. In fact, in the five minutes I was standing near the sign, at least 4 or 5 other folks stopped to take the same pic of the sign that I did.

It is pretty easy to see something like the 'Not Haunted' sign and have a reaction along the lines of 'Look at this example, HR/Business professional, and try to make your communications, job ads, emails etc. more punchy so that folks will stop and actually read/remember them.'

But I think you also need to be careful with that kind of approach and advice. You can reasonably go two ways with dropping the equivalent of a 'Not Haunted' in your standard communications.

The first way is that you actually do get folks to stop and notice your communication or job ad with some kind of edgy line or element. Just like people stopped on the street to laugh at and take pictures of the sign, mostly tourists that had no intention of actually inquiring about the apartment lease, your folks, many of whom that might not be in your target audience, will stop and notice/engage with your content.  That is a win, mostly, but only a win if you have built up at least some credibility and trust as a communicator, and your moment of edginess has at least some context to support it. The 'Not Haunted' sign works in the French Quarter of New Orleans because in that place, themes of strangeness, weirdness, voodoo, and general fun prevail. 'Not Haunted' fits there. 

And that takes us to the other way the equivalent for you of something like 'Not Haunted' can turn out, as something that seems completely out of place, or creates a suggestion or an implication of an experience that you can't deliver. If you suddenly start punching up job ads will all manner of clever and newly invented titles, edgy statements of company culture, and describe the ideal candidate in some kind of a combination of rock star, champion athlete, and Don Draper-level creative, you run the risk of coming off as a little bit insincere, and trying a little too hard.

'Not Haunted' works on the New Orleans sign because it fits the context, it's quick to digest, and it shows that the communicator understands the place and the mindsets of their audience. It's easy to tell folks they should be more clever and funny in their communications. It's much harder to do well. And it's even harder than that to do it quickly and concisely.

Take a lesson from the 'Not Haunted' sign sure, but make sure that lesson is that great, funny, memorable communications are a job for real pros. Like Don Draper maybe.

Have a great Tuesday!

Notes from the Road #16 - ALL CAPS EDITION

Submitting this brief dispatch from Delta Flight 2316 to Las Vegas where I am heading to attend, cover, and moderate a session at the Health & Benefits Leadership Conference this week. For folks who might not know this, I live just outside of Rochester, NY, a fine place to live for many reasons, but like many mid-size cities in the US, suffers from a lack of direct flights to many popular destinations. It was this circumstance that had me on my first flight of the day - a 6:10AM early morning short hop to Detroit, where I caught the aforementioned flight to Vegas.

The flight from Rochester to Detroit is short, maybe an hour of total flight time. Add in a few minutes taxiing out and the total time for the flight might have clocked in at about 1:10 this morning. Thanks to the fine, fine folks at Delta, I was upgraded on ROC - DTW flight, in seat 2A. Seated next to me in 2B was your perfectly typical, perhaps stereotypical 'business guy sitting in first class' person. He had the look, the manner, the tech, (iPad and iPhone) of a corporate VP-type. Maybe in consulting, maybe in sales, hard to say for sure, but definitely someone pretty high on whatever food chain in which he resides.

So (finally) here's the point of the story. For the entire 1:10 minutes we were on the plane from ROC - DTW the guy in 2B wrote emails, starting on the iPhone, switching to the iPad once airborne, then back to the iPhone again once we landed. Non-stop email.  I mean not one minute he was not emailing. It was an impressive feat of email stamina.

But that was not the most interesting thing about the guy in 2B. Everyone one of his emails, at least every time that I snuck a peak to my right, was typed in ALL CAPS. EVERY EMAIL WAS IN ALL CAPS.

Insane, right?

Can you imagine being a person on the receiving end of one of Mr. VP's all caps emails that was sent from a plane at 6:05AM? I have to think anyone who received one of those this morning could not have been all that excited about that prospect.

Look, everyone knows that emailing in all caps is akin to shouting at someone, and you should never do it. But I think it indicates more than just bad email etiquette. It flags you as having just about no self-awareness, no understanding of what kind of impact you're having on folks, (especially if you are the boss, like I suspect Mr. 2B is). 

I couldn't not stop thinking about Mr 2B's staff when they fired up their email this morning. They had to have been hoping they'd have a quiet day, since 2B was on a 6:00AM flight and would not be around today to bug them. Instead, they likely received an ALL CAPS blast before they got their coffee.

Work can sometimes be a drag. In fact, it often can be a drag. It sometimes is hard to tell why. But guys like Mr. 2B are certainly not helping matters.

If you work for Mr. ALL CAPS guy I feel for you today. Hang in there.

Poker, dating, and responding to email - it's all about the timing

Good poker players will tell you, at least I am pretty sure they will tell you, that no matter if your cards are good, bad, or somewhere in between, that a smart player will respond and react to the betting action in a consistent manner. If you call or raise a bet too quickly or eagerly, that might be a 'tell' that you are holding some great cards and can't wait to get more money into the pot. Similarly, waiting and belaboring a decision to call a bet could signal a comparatively weak hand, and embolden your opponents.

So the smart play is to find and maintain a consistent rhythm or cadence to your reactions and decisions, good cards or bad, and eliminate at least one source of intelligence for the other players. Don't get too twitchy, don;t wait too long to move, and you maintain some control of both your emotions as well as the table.

I suppose the same argument could be made in dating where guys have, for pretty much forever, had to figure out how quickly to call after an initial meeting and exchange of phone numbers, or a positive first date. Call too soon then you come off too eager and possibly creepy. Wait too long to call back and you might send off a 'I'm not really interested' vibe that inadvertently could short-circuit the relationship from the beginning. So it's a tough call (no pun intended), figuring out the proper 'wait' interval for the call so that you don't screw it up or send the wrong message.

This kind of 'How long do I wait to react?' dilemma pops up in all kinds of workplace situations as well - in when to speak up in meetings, following up after a job interview, and particularly one that stands out for me, the 'How long do I wait to respond to this email?' conundrum.

Here's the scenario I want you to consider. You send an important'ish email to a colleague - maybe your boss or a sales or job prospect, not one of your direct reports, the idea being the person you emailed does not have any kind of 'expected response time' commitment to your emails. But you are eager for a response nonetheless. Then this person sits on your email for a bit. Maybe a day, maybe two, maybe even a week. Again, they don't really 'owe' you a reply in any specific timeframe, but they 'should' get back to you at some point. So a few days pass, let's say about six, then you finally get a reply back to the email that for which you've been eagerly waiting. 

And now the moment of truth, like the poker player having to decide how long to wait before pushing in your chips, you have to determine when to reply to the reply, to the message that you waiting six long days to receive. If you immediately hit back, say within a half hour of getting the message you are sending out a couple of signals that you may not really want to send. First, you come off as a little bit desperate or at least over eager. You waited six days to get a response and you're firing back in almost real-time. You may just be excited, but you also could appear weak. And second, and maybe this is just a hangup I have, you set yourself up as someone who is constantly, perhaps obsessively, monitoring your Inbox. Most productivity folks recommend checking and responding to emails a couple, maybe three times a day. Getting an immediate reply back tells me you never stop looking at your email.

So what is the 'right' or best way to mange this situation? 

Unless the subject matter is really urgent, or has some kind of hard deadline associated with it, I think you have to wait at least half as long to reply back than it took for you to get your original reply. So in our example if it took six days to hear back from your emailer, then you should be able to hold out for a couple, even three days to respond back. Waiting, at least a little, sends a couple of more positive messages. It shows you have other things going on besides waiting for that email. It shows that you took some time to actually think about your reply. And finally, it sort of but not quite evens the power dynamic between you and your correspondent.

So if you want to play the power game at the poker table of in your Inbox, take a little time before you re-raise and before you reply. You don't want to show what you're holding but acting too fast.

And to everyone waiting for an email reply back from me, I promise they are coming soon...

Team PowerPoint vs. Team Excel

What would you say is the preferred tool or mechanism for creating, sharing, and socializing information in your organization that is used to generate discussion and ultimately, decisions?

While many of us (sadly) would probably default to 'Email' as the technology of choice, even heavy email cultures rely on 'real' office productivity applications for work products and communicating information. Excel and PowerPoint, assuredly, are two of the most common applications in use across organizations of all types. But which one of these two applications tends to dominate how business information and data are documented and shared can reveal plenty about how decisions are made and what kind of organizational culture prevails.

Check the below excerpt from a recent piece on Digitopoly, a review of research into how competing teams at NASA (Team PowerPoint and Team Excel), created and shared data and information on robot technology used for experiments on space projects:

On Team Excel, the robot has a number of instruments but separate teams manage and have property rights over those instruments. The structure is hierarchical and the various assignments the instruments are given are mapped out in Excel. By contrast on Team PowerPoint, no one team owns an instrument. Instead, all decisions regarding, say, where to position the robot are made collectively in a meeting. The meetings are centered around PowerPoint presentations that focus on qualitative trade-offs from making one decision rather than another. Then decisions are taken using a consensus approach — literally checking if everyone is “happy.”

What is fascinating about this is that the type of data collected by each team is very different. On Team Excel where each instrument is controlled and specialised to its task, the data from them is very complete and comprehensive on that specific thing — say, light readings, infrared etc. On Team PowerPoint, there are big data gaps for each instrument but there appear to be more comprehensive deep analyses of particular phenomenon where all of the instruments can oriented towards the measurement of a common thing. This is a classic trade-off between specialised knowledge and deep knowledge. What is extraordinary is that they bake the trade-off into their organisational structure and also decision-making tools — literally emphasizing different apps in Microsoft Office.

We probably don't consciously think too much about how the technology and tools choices we make can effect how the organization actually functions, what particular approaches and skills tend to dominate, and even what gets recognized and rewarded. In the example from the Digitopoly piece, an argument is made that both of these approaches, Team Excel with its focus on individual accountability and control, and Team PowerPoint that relied much more on shared accountability and the 'big picture', are needed and have value.

Where we get into trouble, I think, is when one type of technology, say PowerPoint, becomes dominant or the de facto method in an organization for communicating information and as a decision support tool. It is by its nature, shallow, and it assumes that viewers and readers understand the details and deeper contexts about the subject matter that is typically just about impossible to convey in a slide deck.

Similar arguments can be made on cultures where 95% of communication is over email, or tied up in impossibly complex Excel workbooks. 

We often choose the easy or expected technology solution out of habit, or out of a kind of cultural allegiance. It is fascinating how these technology choices can impact much more than we think.

Team Excel. Team PowerPoint. That really shouldn't be the choice. Team 'Right tool for the job' is. Choose wisely.

Have a great week!

A feature that Email should steal from the DMV

In New York State, and I suspect in other places as well, when you visit a Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) office to get a new license, register your sailing vessel, or try to convince the nice bureaucrats that you did in fact pay those old parking ticket fines, there is generally a two-step process for obtaining services.

You first enter the office and wait in line to be triaged by a DMV rep, and once he/she determines the nature of your inquiry, you receive a little paper ticket by which you are assigned a customer number, and an estimated waiting time until you will be called by the next DMV agent. You then commence waiting until your number is announced and you can complete your business. 

That little bit of information, the estimated wait time, is the aspect of the DMV experience that I think has tons of potential for in other areas, most notably in Email communications. The DMV estimates your wait time, (I imagine), in a really simplistic manner. It is a function of the number of customers waiting ahead of you, the number of DMV agents available, and the average transaction time for each customer to be served. Simple math, and probably is pretty accurate most of the time.

The Email version of the 'Estimated Wait Time' function would be used to auto-reply to every (or selected) incoming email messages with a 'Estimated Response Time' that would provide the emailer with information about how long they should expect to wait before receiving a reply. 

How would this work, i.e., what would the 'Estimated Response Time' algorithm need to take into account? Probably, and at least the following data points.

1. The relationship between the sender and the recipient - how frequently emails are exchanged, how recent was the last exchange, and what has been the typical response time to this sender in the past

2. The volume of email needing action/reply in the recipient's inbox at the time the email is received, and how that volume level has impacted response times in the past

3. The recipient's calendar appointments (most email and calendar services are shared/linked), for the next 1, 3, 12, 24, etc. hours. Is the recipient in meetings all day? Going on vacation tomorrow? About to get on a cross-country flight in two hours?

4. The subject matter of the email, (parsed for keywords, topics mentioned in the message, attachments, etc.)

5. Whether the recipient is in the 'To' field or in the 'CC' field, whether there are other people in the 'To' and 'CC' fields, and the relationship of the recipient to anyone else receiving the email

And probably a few more data points I am not smart enough to think of in the 20 minutes or so I have been writing this.

The point?

That a smart algorithm, even a 'dumb' one like at the DMV, could go a long way to help manage communications, workflow, and to properly set expectations. When you send someone an email you (usually) have no idea how many other emails they just received that hour, what their schedule looks like, the looming deadlines they might be facing, and the 12,458 other things that might influence when/if they can respond to your message. But with enough data, and the ability to learn over time, the 'Expected Response Time' algorithm would let you know as a sender what you really need to know: whether and when you might hear back.

Let's just hope once the algorithm is in place, we all don't get too many "Expected Response Time = NEVER" replies.

Now please Google, or Microsoft, or IBM get to work on this.