Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Steak, Not Sizzle

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Mark Hurd, the recently-departed executive of NCR and CEO HP and Oracle, recalled this best advice he ever got:

When I moved to a head-office in Dayton in 1988, an NCR executive was giving a presentation; he had great slides and an even better delivery. The CEO, Chuck Exley, listened to the entire presentation in his typically gracious, courteous manner. At the conclusion, he nodded and said something brief but profound: “Good story, but it’s hard to look smart with bad numbers.” And as I reflected on it, the presenter, articulate as he was, as good as his slides were, simply had bad numbers.

That comment has always stayed with me. You have to focus on the underlying substance. There’s just no way to disguise poor performance. I’ve tried to follow that advice throughout my career. Deliver good numbers, and you earn the right for people to listen to you.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Succumb to Hype

Marketing and branding have conditioned society to play up—and be attracted to—sizzle over steak. Style over substance.

Sizzle can only get you so far.

Focus on the steak. It is considerate and farsighted and more fulfilling to focus on substantive ideas, products, and presentations.

For sure, sizzle is important. Only when you have a good steak, add some sizzle to promote the bejesus out of whatever it is you have to offer.

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How to Read Faster and Better

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Look at the big picture first.

When reading new, unfamiliar material, do not leap directly into it. You can increase your comprehension and retention if you scan the material first.

Skim headings, subheadings, photo captions, and any available summaries.

Sense how the author has organized the key points. With reports and articles, read the first sentence of each paragraph, with books, glance at the table of contents, and chapter introductions. Scan the initial and concluding paragraphs of each section.

All this previewing will help anchor in your mind what you then read.

However, speed-reading doesn’t work if you need to really get to grips with the content of a piece of writing. So much of what’s significant about reading isn’t just about processing words.

Learn to pace your reading as per your purpose:

  • Read very fast if you’re looking only for a specific piece of information—skimming over revision notes before an exam.
  • Skim over text rapidly if you’re trying to get just general idea without worrying about details, like scanning a news article.
  • Read at a moderate pace if you want to comprehend and retain what you are reading. The more difficult the text, the slower you’ll read. Some texts will require rereading.
  • Read very slowly if you’re probing a text or soaking up its substance. When you just want to sit down and enjoy a good book, what’s the point in rushing anyway? After all, reading is about exploration, appreciating the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, thinking deeply, and following your imagination. Refer to Mortimer Adler’s guide to intelligent reading, How to Read a Book (1972; my summary.)

Idea for Impact: Reading is a skill, and, like any other skill, it’s worth your time to take, master, and enjoy. Skimming will help you cope with the overwhelming amount of text you’ll have to read in this day and age.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. How to Read the AP Stylebook
  3. A Guide to Intelligent Reading // Book Summary of Mortimer Adler’s ‘How to Read a Book’
  4. How to … Read More Books
  5. Rip and Read During Little Pockets of Time

Inspirational Quotations #850

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All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.
—Juvenal (Roman Poet)

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are those that other folks have lent me.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)

Prayer is the little implement through which men reach; where presence is denied them.
—Emily Dickinson (American Poet)

The difference between one man and another is not mere ability … it is energy.
—Thomas Arnold (English Educationalist)

Of all God’s gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.
—John Ruskin (English Art Critic)

There is but one way to tranquillity of mind and happiness; let this, therefore, be always ready at hand with thee, both when thou wakest early in the morning, and all the day long, and when thou goest late to sleep, to account no external things thine own, but commit all these to God.
—Epictetus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.
—William Butler Yeats (Irish Poet)

Literature is a great staff, but a sorry crutch.
—Walter Scott (Scottish Novelist)

Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio, or looked at a TV. They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would mark.
—Carl Sandburg (American Poet, Historian)

It matters not how long you live, but how well.
—Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer)

Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.
—Aldous Huxley (English Humanist)

If only people thought a little more about it, they would see that life is not worrying about so much.
—Mikhail Lermontov (Russian Novelist, Poet)

There’s no voiceless, there’s only the deliberately silenced or the purposely unheard.
—Arundhati Roy (Indian Novelist, Activist)

All oppression creates a state of war; this is no exception.
—Simone de Beauvoir (French Philosopher)

Gratitude is the memory of the heart; therefore forget not to say often, I have all I have ever enjoyed.
—Lydia Maria Child (American Abolitionist)

Easy Ways to Boost Your Focus & Stop Multitasking

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If you’re struggling to focus on getting work done, perhaps the following tips may help.

1. Simplify Your Environment. We, humans, are biologically programmed to pay attention to new stimuli. Disable notifications on your phone, close the unnecessary windows on your screen, and clear up unnecessary papers. Switch off to switch on. Find a quiet space in the office or retreat to the local library or a tearoom.

2. Make Your Mind Up to Focus. Set aside a block of time—even if it’s just ten minutes—to handle a mentally challenging task without interruptions. Quite often, seemingly difficult tasks get easier once you get working on them, even if you force yourself to go through the motions. Extend the time further—schedule ten, twenty, or thirty more minutes of work.

3. Embrace Your Struggles. Any task that takes mental effort, or involves critical thinking and creativity, is going to be a little daunting initially. When you hit a wall, don’t quit and breakout to something easier. Labor through and push onwards.

4. Take Adequate Breaks. Humans work in cycles; we can focus for a period but then need time to rest. Try the popular ‘Pomodoro Technique’: work for a concentrated 25 minutes, take a 5-minute time out, then dive back in for another Pomodoro. After four Pomodoros, take a long break. During each break, leave your desk or take a break from your screen. Go for a quick walk around the block, step away from your desk for a few minutes, or make a cup of tea. Realizing that you only have a set amount of time to complete a task before a break, the Pomodoro Technique tends to keep you on the task rather than drifting from one diversion to another.

By ditching multitasking and regaining focus, you can reduce distraction, lower stress levels, and put more of your energy into what’s important instead—one single task at a time.

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  4. Always Demand Deadlines: We Perform Better Under Constraints
  5. Do Things Fast

Don’t Live in a World Ruled by Falsehoods

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“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” defined the American author Philip K. Dick.

Lying is second nature to us, and under the influence of improbable thinking, even idealism, we’ll hang ourselves if given enough rope. Rebekah Campbell of the New York Times observed,

A study by the University of Massachusetts found that 60 percent of adults could not have a 10-minute conversation without lying at least once. The same study found that 40 percent of people lie on their resumes and a whopping 90 percent of those looking for a date online lie on their profiles.

Most people lie about little things to make them look good. People lie to stave off the consequences of making a mistake, to buy more time or to spare someone’s feelings. Their hearts may be in the right place, but they are still telling lies.

Telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a client or a member of your team, you create a false reality and you start living in it.

Idea for Impact: Stop Living in a World of Illusions

Live in the world of reality, not in the world of how you perceive reality.

Realistic thinking is grounded in an honest appraisal of all facts and data and conditions in different situations. Realistic thinking affords a clear-headed and conscious thought and behavior.

The great undertaking in life is to discover reality—to be truly honest and transparent with yourself about everything.

The meditation master Kalu Rinpoche wrote in The Dharma: That Illuminates All Beings Impartially Like the Light of the Sun and Moon (1986,)

You live in illusion, and the appearance of things.
There is a reality, but you do not know this.
When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing.
And being nothing, you are everything.
That is all.

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Undertake Not What You Cannot Perform

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Each time you break a promise or commitment, even to yourself, you chip away at your claim—and your intention—to be a responsible, reliable, self-aware person.

Making promises and keeping them is how you build integrity, how you foster relationships of trust, and, more importantly, how you learn to trust yourself.

Every time you break a promise, your word has less value.

Giving your word is a serious undertaking, even on trivial matters. Never ever make a promise that you think there is even the slightest chance that you may break.

Idea for Impact: Don’t make a promise if a situation warrants a more open-ended response.

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Living with Rules You Don’t Like

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As a manager, sometimes you have to enforce rules that you don’t agree with.

Try your best to empathize with the rules, and if you can’t, you have no choice to accept the rules and implement them.

No manager wants to be the bearer of bad news, particularly when it’s about something the manager disagrees with. To avoid conflict with your employees, be concise, straightforward, and empathetic. Pass on the underlying principle communicated down to you. Then assert, “I’m afraid we have to live with this rule.”

Allow for venting, but discourage debate.

To maintain respect for those who have made the decisions, you may add, “Our executives have considered other options. They’ve made the choices based on what’s best for the organization. Decisions made at the top are often the final word on a subject. Rules are the rules. It’s okay to question them and not like them, but they still need to be followed.”

Emphasize that some disputes and disagreements are worth fighting, and others just aren’t. “I certainly don’t like it any more than you do. This isn’t the choice I would have made. But, let’s live with this rule, implement the change to the best of our abilities, and focus on our work and our team.”

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Leaders Need to Be Strong and Avoid Instilling Fear

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Fear is many a leader’s dirty little secret. He can use it when he’s either unwilling or unable to persuade his team to work together to achieve a specific goal.

Sure, fear gets results. However, it does so at a great cost.

Fear can be enormously helpful for spurring change, particularly during periods of acute threat. But fear can backfire under certain circumstances, especially when creativity is necessary. Using fear and intimidation as a motivator only shuts down people’s brains.

People don’t always think and act rationally when they’re afraid. Fear and anxiety make it more difficult to have their energy and enthusiasm to keep going.

A leader needs to be strong without instilling fear. Often all a leader can do to motivate people is to foster a workplace wherein people feel safe bringing themselves to work.

People can contribute, be creative, and be motivated internally. There’s no need to watch them like a hawk, micromanage excessively, track every move they make, question every decision, or enact rules that make people feel constrained and under surveillance.

Idea for Impact: Steer clear of a tyrannical management style. Use feedback and coaching to be considerate and encouraging whenever you can be, and tough when you must be.

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  5. Never Criticize Little, Trivial Faults

How to Develop Customer Service Skills // Summary of Lee Cockerell’s ‘The Customer Rules’

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Becoming great at customer service doesn’t require you to excel at a zillion things. You’ll just need to identify the core principles and get the basics right.

“At the end of the day, everything a business leader does is in the service of customer service … the customer always rules, and there are Rules for winning customers, keeping customers, and turning loyal customers into advocates and emissaries for your business,” writes Lee Cockerell in his prescriptive manual on The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service (2013.)

Cockerell is a veteran of the hospitality industry and an eminent corporate trailer. He spent eight years with Hilton, 17 years with Marriott, and 16 years with the Walt Disney. Before retirement, he was the executive vice president of operations at Walt Disney World in Florida and oversaw the resort’s 40,000 employees at 20 hotels, four theme parks, and two water parks.

Non-obvious Customer Service Insights

Cockerell structures his guidebook along 39 tips to serve customers with consistency, efficiency, creativity, and sincerity. He glosses over everything—hiring right, communicating a clear and relevant customer promise, fostering a customer-oriented culture, and creating a superior employee experience. Those employees can deliver a great customer experience, respond to complaints, and practice verbal skills to express empathy.

  • Make customer service every employee’s responsibility. Everything every employee does can have tremendous repercussions on the service your customers receive, and therefore your bottom line. “Pay close attention to every decision you make, every policy you announce, every procedure you introduce, every person you hire, every promotion you award, every e-mail you send, every conversation you have, every hand you shake, and every back you slap.”
  • You win customers one at a time and lose them a thousand at a time. Satisfied customers will spread the word only if they’re truly blown away their experience. Angry customers are “far more motivated to shout about their feelings, and furious exposes get a lot more attention than glowing testimonials. Humans are wired to pay more attention to the negative than the positive.”
  • Anticipate your customers’ needs. Discover what customers aren’t getting from your competitors and give it to them. Customers’ problems are a good source of business innovations. “Great businesses stand out by being different from the rest in the right way: by finding customer needs that are going unmet and figuring out a way to meet them.”
  • Keep an eye on your competitors. Be a copycat. Look outside your industry for great ideas and tweak them for their own purposes. “Don’t just imitate; pay attention to everything around you, spot the best ideas, and then find a better way to apply them.”
  • Treat customers the way you’d treat your loved ones. “First and last impressions have a tremendous influence on a customer’s lasting impression. A cheery hello and a sincere good-bye can leave a customer with a memory of a positive experience, regardless of what happens in between.”
  • Treat every customer like a regular. Familiarity breeds repeat business. “Do whatever you can to make regular customers feel like family and new customers feel like regulars. Remember the theme song from the TV series Cheers? Don’t you want to go “where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came”? Make all your customers feel that you’re really glad they came.”
  • Prioritize WIN, “what’s important now,” your customers’ immediate needs, desires, and concerns. “Even a nod, a gesture, some brief eye contact, a pleasant “I’ll be right with you. Please make yourself comfortable”—that’s all it takes. People want to be acknowledged.”
  • Surprise your customers with a little extra when they least expect it. Neuroscientists have confirmed that the human brain “craves the excitement of surprise. The region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, aka the pleasure center, experiences more activation when a pleasurable stimulus comes unexpectedly than it does when the same pleasure is predictable. “So if you get a present for your birthday, that’s nice. But you’ll like it a lot more if you get a present and it’s not your birthday.””
  • Don’t try too hard. “Being excessively solicitous and eager to please is annoying.” It makes you seem phony. “Think how annoying it is when a server at a restaurant stops by your table every five minutes to ask if everything’s okay with your meal.” No one likes to be pestered constantly. “If your customers have to stifle the urge to scream, “Go away!” or, “Leave us alone!” you’re trying too hard.”

Recommendation: Read Lee Cockerell’s The Customer Rules. With plenty of anecdotes, experiences, and very short no-nonsense chapters, this book is an enjoyable summary of the many simple—but often overlooked—first principles of building a customer-oriented culture and delivering great customer service.

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  2. A Rule Followed Blindly Is a Principle Betrayed Quietly
  3. Consistency Counts: Apply Rules Fairly Every Time
  4. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  5. From the Inside Out: How Empowering Your Employees Builds Customer Loyalty

Inspirational Quotations #849

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Not a mother, not a father will do so much, nor any other relative; a well-directed mind will do us greater service.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.
—Robert Boyle (Irish Scientist, Philosopher)

What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?
—Mikhail Bulgakov (Russian Novelist, Dramatist)

Eagles don’t flock–you have to find them one at a time.
—Ross Perot (American Businessman)

It is sinful to even see the face of a man who does not feel his friend’s pain. Treat your own mountain-like pain as though it were a speck. Treat your friend’s speck-like pain as though it were a mountain.
—Tulsidas (Indian Hindu Poet)

When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.
—Edith Wharton (American Novelist, Short-story Writer)

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
—Virginia Woolf (English Novelist)

Hair is another name for sex.
—Vidal Sassoon (Anglo-American Hairstylist)

I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education
—Thomas Jefferson (American Head of State)

It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.
—Nikolai Gogol (Russian Novelist, Dramatist)

Fine feathers make fine birds.
—Aesop (Greek Fabulist)

Remember that you don’t have to like or admire someone to feel compassion for that person. All you have to do is wish for that person to be happy.
—Thanissaro Bhikkhu (American Buddhist Monk)

Leaders learn by leading, and they learn best by leading in the face of obstacles. As weather shapes mountains, problems shape leaders.
—Warren Bennis (American Management Consultant)

To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence.
—Sun Tzu (Chinese Military Leader)

The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself.
—Bernard M. Baruch (American Financier)

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (American Economist)

Sometimes the easiest way to get something done is to be a little naive about it.
—Bill Joy (American Computer Engineer)