Ugandan women sell health, using the Avon ladies’ approach. Yes, door-to-door outreach looks different in villages than in American suburbs.
But a template leverages profits faster for them, and for you. The same woman-to-woman franchise that sold creams and make-up in the U.S. is selling preventive know-how to stop malaria, diarrhea and TB in over 100 countries. Using a micro-finance template to franchising, LivingGoods, based here in my town of Sausalito, has built “an $8 billion business with over five million agents.” These “mobile health entrepreneurs” get uniforms, training, promotional support and quality monitoring. Like Delancey Street, LivingGoods provides all the tools to actually change behavior as described in Influencer.
The licensed agents are not taught to shame people out of dangerous health habits.
Telling clients what they should do doesn’t work. Instead, Albert Bandura advises, link people’s actions to their values. Influence expert, William Miller told the authors of Influencer:
• “The more you try to control others, the less control you gain.
• The instant you stop trying to impose your agenda on others, you eliminate the fight for control.
• You sidestep irrelevant battles over whose view of the world is correct.”
• Instead:
- Ask what better outcome someone wants, listening closely
- Then offer suggestions that help her reach those outcomes, offering steady support over time.
Living Goods agents gain confidence and make more money over time as they get frequent, consistent feedback on their skill-building progress.
You, too, can adopt the Leveraging Effect
The LivingGoods template is scalable. It can be replicated elsewhere – and honed over time because those who use it experience direct benefit from improving it. Similarly, Nido Qubein’s Great Harvest Bread franchisees enjoy profits and camaraderie by sharing ways to grow their local bakeries faster. To thrive in a down economy, use your skills to craft a template – a business model that you can franchise or license to others – or coach them to implement on their own as Susan Page and Jake have done.
Only the loony disregard this crashing economy. Yet the prudent recognize it’s vital now to practice resilience, even virtue. It helps to be near friends who feel the same. (Who lifts your spirits?) So it also helps to know that we’re born with a set point for happiness.
The good news is that set point “determines just 50% of happiness. A mere 10% can be attributed to differences in people’s life circumstances – that is, whether they are rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, married or divorced, etc. This leaves a surprising 40% of our capacity for happiness within our power to change.” That’s
the theory of The How of Happiness author, Sonja Lyubomirsky and her two colleagues, Ken Sheldon and David Schkade.
Since we experience negative emotions faster, more intensely and longer, to enjoy life more we must cultivate a 3 to 1 ratio of positive to negative emotions, believes Positivity author Barbara L. Fredrickson.
Her suggestions to achieve this ratio sound familiar:
• Meditate
• Reduce exposure to negative news
• Cultivate kindness
• Connect with nature
She offers a “broaden-and-build” approach. In short, choose how you view a situation. If it makes you feel down, look at the bigger picture. This reminds me of the “make a bigger pie” negotiation technique. When you feel you need more clout among the players in the discussion, involve more people.
As Frederickson notes,” pleasant emotions like hope, inspiration, joy, and well-earned pride literally open us. As the blinders of negativity fall away, we take in more of what surrounds us. We see both the forest and the trees. We appreciate the oneness that binds us instead of the barriers that divide us. Even race becomes irrelevant.”
The benefits of optimism, according to Frederickson:
Positive thinking opens our minds.
Positive thinkers:
• See more of the world around them
• Are more likely to find innovative solutions to problems.
People imbued with positivity are:
• Healthier
• More generous
• More productive
They:
• Bounce back from adversity more quickly
• Make better managers
• Live longer
So, let’s grab more moments to go on a walk/talk, pick up the phone to praise and to share our reasons to be grateful.
I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. That’s a mighty welcome feeling as we enter 2009. Why? Because, more than any of the last 25 years, 2009 will crackle with change, unexpected loss and fresh opportunities to be there for each other.
Consequently, prepare by picturing your Circles of Connection. On whom can you most depend and how? What can you ask of each other?
It’s time to:
• Hone your differentiating mastery for a more fulfilling life.
• Be more specifically, continuously helpful in your tribes.
To practice your greatest talents more often and maximize your value for and with others, visualize a set of circles of relationships, with the strongest connections in your inner circle and the weaker ties further out. Here’s the rewards for picturing them, then the plan for identifying those circles.
First the rewards. Circles …
1. Create a context for your life …
2. That enables you to make wiser choices with …
• more grace towards yourself and others, and
• less stress or regret.
3. So you can be …
• less rushed and more focused.
• able to accomplish “first things first.”
4. Use your best talents more often to hone them sooner (10,000 rule).
5. Provide help that is appreciated and often reciprocated.
6. Collaborate in ways that use best talents - and benefit all participants.
Now, the plan - picturing your circles.
In light of your …
• top two goals (one for work and one for life) for 2009.
• two kinds of resources – yours and those you can attract from others.
… what is your “first things first” plan for each month? What tasks will you do “first thing” each week, each day … each hour?
To become higher-performing and happier – with others, see how you want to involve them in the next chapter of the adventure you want for your life story in 2009.
Picture your personal circles in a more concrete way using Christopher Allen’s helpful template. When done, consider people you’d like to move to a closer circle or further out or add to a circle. How will you make it more likely to happen?
(I add a first category to Allen’s four circles)
0. My Main Friend
To whom would you turn first for any kind of help, sympathy, celebration or other need to connect? (How many would not turn to a spouse, other kind of partner or family member first?)
1. The Support Circle
Any time, night or day, you can rely on these 3-5 people, some of whom may be kin.
2. The Emotional Circle
You can turn to these individuals for sympathy and whose death would be devastating to you. You may have a “non-mutual” emotional connection with them. Many have 10-15 people in this circle yet others have 7 or 20, according to Allen, yet other research shows those numbers are going down. Increasingly individuals have just 2 to 3 people in this circle.
3. The Trust Circle
You have experience with each person in this circle, instances that made you feel you could trust them. You feel strong ties to the 40 to 200 people in your circle.
4. Familiar Strangers
People you recognize and they may have heard of you. Individuals here may be a two or three degrees away “friend” such as those who have befriended you at Facebook or LinkedIn because you share a mutual friend or friend-of-friend. These are weaker ties than those in your Trust Circle yet are also valuable in job-hunting and other needs.
“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable.” - Martin Buber
When you finish writing your top two (actionable) goals and then crafting your Circles of Connections, tell me how you would improve this approach – or suggest a better approach to planning for a positive 2009. What emotional shifts, if any, happened in you as a consequence of this process? Did it help you picture your opportunities? Did you discover a way to be more valuable for yourself – or someone else?
Concluding caveat from Tom Paine, “It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies…”
Your customers are tempted to include your business in their cost-cutting efforts. Act now to offer extra value, adopting a method that won’t cost you more. In fact, it often reduces overhead. Two rival businesses are using it.
The Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post will offer their readers stories from both papers. The Sun will “tap the Post’s federal government coverage” and The Washington Post will carry the Sun’s regional coverage. Consequently, the newspapers can cut overhead and “benefit from each others expertise.” And readers have a new reason to remain subscribers.
Evoke this Value Multiplier Effect by forging partnerships with others who serve your kind of customer. You can deepen customer loyalty and become the top-of-mind choice for more customers and media coverage.
Helpful Tips Always Trump Advertising
Keep customers by sharing content in other ways. Collectively you gain more credibility and visibility and usually reduce costs for attracting customers. The locally-owned Michigan businesses and non-profits in this story, for example, could become more well-known than their competitors by co-creating a Hot Tips sheet, perhaps called “How to Live Well at Home as You Age.” The company that acts first in recruiting partners, ensures that it gets included: Bissell Homecare, Williams Kitchen and Bath, The Right Place and Disability Advocates.
Plus partners could invite national groups like Whirlpool, GE, Lowes, home remodelers and others to share this tip sheet, thus creating a fresh news hook for more local and national media, blogging and other coverage.
How to Co-create and Distribute Popular Hot Tips
Recruit other reputable business owners that serve the same kind of customer that you serve. As in the Michigan story, include non-profits such as civic, cause or other membership groups or even government agencies. Variety in kinds of partners builds credibility and interest.
Pick a hot topic that reflects a strong interest or need or familiar situation faced by your mutual market of customers – and that includes tips that highlight the benefits of all partners’ organizations. Get a professional writer to interview you to cull tips and write a draft for your collective review. Or one of the partners could write a draft that a professional editor hones for final agreement by all partners. At the end of the tips, include a very brief description (not advertisement) of each partner and contact information.
Reach more customers more often by offering the tips in more formats. Video each other and happy customers, demonstrating and discussing the tips at various locations including at your business. Post the text, audio and video versions of your tips on all partners’ web sites or blogs and post online. At your physical locations display and give away the print versions, show the video on a wall screen.
In this way you:
• Gain a warmed-up introduction to each other’s customers.
• May offer more value than your competitors.
• Inspire more customers to refer their friends.
• Become a top-of-mind expert for future media stories that cover your kind of work.
“It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own. “ ~ Joyce Carol Oates
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung
“We judge others by their acts, but ourselves by our intentions.” ~ American proverb
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction then both are changed.” ~ Carl Jung
“Mutual understanding and the human touch are in inverse relationship to frequency of encounter and kinship.” ~ Yi Tuan
“A true leader is not one you look up to because they are the best. A true leader is one that draws the best out in you.” ~ Anne Warfield
“A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” ~ Henrik Warfield
“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” ~ anonymous
“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” ~ Samuel Johnson
“You can’t stay mad at somebody who makes you laugh.” ~ Jay Leno
“In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.” ~ Blaise Pascal
“In the religion of love to pray is to pass, by a single word, into the inner chamber of the other.” ~ Galway Kinnell
“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
“To love another person is to see the face of God.” ~ Victor Hugo
“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Arthur Baldwin
“Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion.” ~ Dwight Macdonald
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne “All value resides in individuals. Value is distributed in individual space. Relalationship economic is the framework for wealth creation. Deep support is the new metaproduct. ~ Shshanna Zuboff
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” ~ Victor Hugo
“We didn’t come over on the same ship, but were all in the same boat.” ~ Bernard M. Baruch
“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, I was wrong.” ~ Sydney J. Harris
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
“It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies…” ~ Tom Paine
“Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” ~ Chief Seattle
“Many candles can be kindled from one candle without diminishing it.” ~ The Midrash
Obama keeps assuming that you and I can recruitteamsofrivals (and participate in other teams) to get greater things done better – together. Why not try these team-building behaviors in your social, civic or work life now?
Here’s six keys to cultivating thriving teams like the thousands launched during the fast-growing, “no drama” Obama campaign:
1. Be specific about the top, actionable goal of the group.
2. Identify what needs to be done to reach the goal, then recruit individuals who have the specific talents or other resources to get those tasks done.
3. Approach each person by describing the goal, the specific way each one can help achieve it and why it would benefit that person; then describe the Sweet Spot of mutual benefit for all teammates to participate.
4. Review above 3 items with everyone when first meeting together; ask for improvements in the goal and if others should be recruited to accomplish it; then agree on who should facilitate the group.
5. Seek agreement on the Rules of Engagement by which your group will operate and on the timetable.
6. When the goal is met, de-brief on what worked and what didn’t, then discuss other possible goals for which some or all team mates may want to work together again. Why not start now where you face a problem or an opportunity?
Want to stand out from the competition? Take a cue from a bank. Some people in Orange County, California, will be walking into a local bank branch to vote. Many will be assisted by bank volunteers who have been trained as poll workers. This SmartPartnership made local and international news. Would you like customer-attracting media coverage too? Read on.
Help Solve a Problem
In past elections many county registrars across the country scrambled to establish places for people to vote and attract enough poll workers. The bank is offering this service for free and will not be “drumming up business outside voting booths” says Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley.
Yet Wells Fargo gains a priceless halo effect as Americans carry out the centerpiece of our democracy in their bank.
“The poll site is a sanctuary of sorts. It’s a place that is completely neutral: There’s no promotion, there’s no advertising, nothing,” Kelley said. “The goal of the program is to recruit poll workers — not to brand a stadium.”
In exchange Wells Fargo wins the opportunity to use the Orange County seal on its literature and website, and advertise its partnership with the county – and thus its support of democracy. This Me2We approach generates fresh value and visibility for partners that they could not achieve on their own.
Smart Partnering Method Generates Goodwill and Good Value
A SmartPartnership is an alliance among two or more organizations that generates additional value for the “mutual market” of customers the partners seek to serve. In a weak economy, SmartPartnerships is valuable for consumer-serving companies as they are often less expensive yet more credible and memorable than traditional advertising and solo promotions. For example, another popular, private /public SmartPartnership is the Adopt-a-Highway programs sprinkled across the country.
Any Kind or Size of Consumer-Serving Organization
Can Become More Valuable by SmartPartnering
If you are in business, what kind of SmartPartnership with a government agency would generate fresh value for the agency and positive visibility in front of your kind of customer?
If you work in a government agency what kind of SmartPartnership would expand your capacity to serve or offer a new program or provide more convenience for those you serve?
Tired of self-promotion? Would you like to make work and life easier, more productive and fun – with others? Here’s four ways others accomplish more together than you can on your own – and sometimes forge friendships.
1. Co-create Products, Cause Support and More
• From clothing design to science experiments, the right crowd can get more done together.
• Collaborate online for a cause or faster innovation - and to become more well-known.
• Crowdsource a contest; take it public.
2. Swap and Share
• Enjoy more travel by house swapping or other shared hospitality.
• Swap books, lightly-used clothes and more.
• Moms share everything from recipes to medical advice.
3. Get More Out of Meetings
• Organize meetings for those who share your interest and perhaps make money.
• Capture the benefits of twittering at conferences.
• Create conference formats that will excite and involve attendees.
• Start a mutual growth, support or mastermind group.
• Share ideas in a fast and fun way for everyone. Try Ignite and Pecha Kucha.
• Make conferences more popular by harnessing the right technology.
4. Attract Customers With the Right Partners and Methods
• Even and especially in a bad economy partnering can be profitable.
• Train others to teach your methods – even sell your stuff.
• Forge an alliance with a bigger business or other organization.
• Recruit an unlikely ally to attract more interest.
Now, what Me2We methods have you used to accomplish more with others?
“Presidential candidate George Bush will be active in making pronouncements in the coming weeks… He wants to define himself before his opponents do it for him,” intoned a radio commentator when the previous Bush became president. Yes, nicknames stick. “To name a thing is not the same as to know a thing,” Richard Feynman wrote, yet naming is a potent persuasion tool.
In fact, your ability to successfully label a person, product or political campaign is probably the most powerful way to influence others’ perceptions of their choices. (Too many choices frustrate us.) Consequently, be armed to argue well. As hot opinions swirl around our presidential campaign and economic troubles, here are some nuggets from Anthony Weston’s pithy Rulebook for Arguments:
1. “If you can’t imagine how anyone could hold the view you are attacking, you just don’t understand it yet.”In seeking possible explanations, solutions or causes, Weston suggests that we keep looking for more options, rather than immediately narrowing them. That way, we can state our case more fairly, and possibly head off objections more effectively.
2. Find out what other sides consider the strongest arguments for their position. Also, I suggest that you find the best evidence and most vivid examples they use or could use to support their positions.
3. Preemptively raise possible counter-arguments. Develop them in sufficient detail that your readers will fully appreciate the position you are disarming.
4. Avoid using two “great fallacies”:
- Generalizing from incomplete information.
- Overlooking alternative explanations.
5. In writing your view:
• Use definite, specific, concrete language.
• Develop one idea per paragraph. Don’t “fence more land than you can plow. One argument well-developed is better than three only sketched.” Attempting otherwise is akin to offering “ten very leaky buckets to one well-sealed one.”
• Get to the point quickly. Avoid redundancy and unnecessary details. (See, also the Heaths’ warning regarding “semantic stretch”).
• State your conclusion clearly, directly and briefly.
6. Emotionally loaded or prejudicial language “preaches only to the converted.”
• Careful presentation of the facts can itself convert.” Moreover,
• “It is not a mistake to have strong views. The mistake is to have nothing else.”
7. Stay open to changing your mind or improving your approach by incorporating others’ ideas, giving them fulsome credit for their insights. (Lincoln would be proud of you.)
Here’s an extraordinary, recent example of two ambitious leaders arguing agreeably about a BIG issue.
Ready for more on decisionmaking traps? T o better understand yourself in relationship to others – and for more ideas to move from me to we – read about Nudge, Sway, Multiplicity, On Being Certain, The Starfish and the Spider and Here Comes Everybody.
In art class we were asked to draw a familiar object. I picked something simple. A tire. No one could recognize it. And yet, after reading The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures I was able to draw a description of SmartPartnering and another on storyboarding.
Let people literally see your idea to adopt it faster or to buy. Read this fun book by Dan Roam. Dan gives you a method based on our six ways of seeing:1. who/what 2. how much 3. where 4. when 5. how 6. why. These ways affect each step in our visually thinking/creating process:
1. Identify the topic/issue
2. Develop an idea/approach, to
3. Express a solution.
Herb Kelleher intuited this approach when he used a bar napkin to show investors how Southwest Airlines could beat competitors.
I thought of Dan’s book when Ellen spoke to me after my session at the IABC conference in New York last week. Her firm, Cognac shows that even complex topics can be understood in ten minutes or less – with the right “big picture” image. Since our brains retain visual information much better (David Melcher says 89% more) than text, this is mighty good news.
Even better, hear Dan lead a teleseminar on July 9th. It’s free. And he’ll be joined by several bright minds: Seth Godin, Anil Dash and Rich Sloan.
Also hear my interviews with two other gurus in the fast-growing field of visual thinking, Lee LeFever and David Sibbet. Here’s Carl Gude’s visual shorthand for politics.
Ok. If you are still not comfortable drawing your own explanation, to illustrate your text, here’s some free resources for drawings, clipart and photos suggested by Meryl Evans.
