Ed Batista: Executive Coaching & Change Management

Visual Images and Effective Communication

2009-07-16T06:54:00-07:00

I've always found that well-designed images enhance effective communication, and current research in neuroscience is helping us to understand why. Information designer Tom Wujec spoke at TED in February on the relationship between visual images and meaning:

What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations that create meaning?

Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead creates a series of mental models through a collection of "a-ha" moments or moments of discovery through various processing...
The act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning...

We make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation...

Wujec proposes three basic guidelines for anyone seeking to communicate more effectively:

1) Use images to clarify what we're trying to communicate.

2) Make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully.
3) Augment memory by creating a visual persistence.

Although my reliance on static images falls short on the interactive front, these concepts certainly underlie my recent posts on a framework for professional and personal development, the importance of time horizons, and the nature of influence.

And these same concepts explain why I'm continually drawn to the efforts of designers like Dustin Curtis and writers like Virginia Postrel, who highlight the utility of good design while also doing work that just looks great. There's also a connection with the work of Howard Gardner on influence--he notes that "A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other," and with a particular emphasis on alternative visual forms of representation.

Finally, for some even more vivid examples of how effective communication can depend on visualization, see Nathan Yau's Flowing Data or the many projects undertaken by the breathtakingly creative people at Stamen.

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for the reference to Tom Wujec, and thanks to David Zinger for the reference to Nathan Yau. If the meaning of the photo above from Spinal Tap is unclear, this clip might help. (Warning: Profanity, power chords, mullets.)

Operator's Manual

2009-07-15T00:35:44-07:00

A few weeks ago I posted six Self-Coaching Guides, compilations of edited posts on the topics of Communication, Leadership, Motivation, Change, Learning and Happiness. Those six topics--listed here in the order they were written--emerged from a review of my work on this site over the past 5 years. As I sifted through more than 600 posts, I found that the ones with lasting relevance to my work as a coach sorted themselves into these topics.

I've continued to reflect on these topics and feel that they cover the full range of issues that come up with my coaching clients and students while also providing a useful overview of my perspective on effectiveness and fulfillment.

Three topics--Communication, Leadership and Change--address our effectiveness relative to our external environment:

How do we communicate with others? How can we express ourselves more effectively?
How do we lead and manage? How can we direct subordinates, influence peers and "manage up" more effectively?
How do we deal with change? How do we make change happen? How can we adapt to--and create--dynamic circumstances more effectively?

The remaining three topics--Happiness, Motivation and Learning--address our sense of fulfillment relative to our internal world:

What makes us happy? Are we both professionally and personally fulfilled?
What motivates us to achieve our fullest potential? Are those drives contributing to our fulfillment? And how do we respond when we feel demotivated?
How do we learn? How do we maximize our fulfillment as learners to insure that our skills keep pace with our challenges?

Rolling this all up into the graphic above creates an Operator's Manual for professional and personal development. We need to look out and assess our effectiveness as communicators, as leaders and as change agents, and we need to look in and determine whether we're truly happy, truly motivated, truly learning--in short, whether we're fulfilled.

There's something meaningful here for me, and I'm considering making this framework the foundation for some ongoing work. If you have any input, I'd love to hear it.

Time Horizons

2009-07-11T11:21:09-07:00

When we assess our lives--our fulfillment, our effectiveness, what's working, what's not working--how far ahead do we look? How far ahead should we look? Is that time horizon a good fit for the issues under consideration? And what issues are most relevant to us in a given time horizon?

The 10 time horizons above are the ones that I find most useful. They're each sufficiently distinct to provide a different perspective and raise a new set of issues, but they flow continuously from this immediate moment to my very last breath. That's not to say that I have a clear plan for each horizon--hardly. (I'm a searcher, not a planner.)

But when looking ahead it's helpful to realize that I've moved from one horizon into the next. It prompts me to ask: Am I in the right timeframe? Should I take a step back--or jump even further ahead? Should my approach change? Am I still asking the right questions? Are the same issues in play?

I chose these specific horizons deliberately: Once I look beyond "Today" my next natural horizon is "This Week," and once I look past Friday the next signpost is a month-and-a-half out. And the "18 Month" horizon fits with Peter Drucker's belief that clear and specific plans can't cover any more time than that. You might choose a different set of horizons--perhaps "This Month" makes more sense to you than "6 Weeks." Or perhaps 10 horizons is too many, and it's more useful to think in broader strokes. For example:

The precise number and scope of the horizons is up to you--choose the ones that best meet your needs. But my larger point is that sometimes we're looking too far ahead when focusing closer in would be more useful, and sometimes we're staring down at our shoes when we really should lift our gaze.

(Here's a 2-slide PowerPoint version [111 KB] of this post.)

Chris Anderson on "Free" at Global Business Network

2009-07-10T00:00:20-07:00

I heard Chris Anderson speak tonight at the offices of the Global Business Network in San Francisco. He's promoting Free: The Future of a Radical Price and is tight with GBN co-founder and Chairman Peter Schwartz, who introduced Anderson and led the Q&A session, so this was presumably a friendly stopover on his media tour.

Anderson opened with the story of how Jell-O was launched in the early 20th century: they went door-to-door and gave away richly illustrated Jell-O cookbooks, creating demand for the new product among consumers, who then flocked to grocery stores seeking it. (It's similar to the story of King Gillette subsidizing the cost of razors to sell blades, which Anderson used to open his original Wired article on the topic in early 2008.)

Anderson discussed the work of 19th century French economist Joseph Bertrand, who argued that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. (A brief exploration of the Bertrand competition model suggests that Anderson is oversimplifying to make a point, but let's not quibble.)

In Anderson's words, "The Internet is the first truly competitive market the world has ever seen," and in this environment we experience "the law of gravity online: If marginal cost is zero, and competition is unlimited, price will fall to zero." Anderson's quick to note that he's not saying the price should be zero or things should be free; he's merely observing the dynamics at work in the market for any products or services that can be converted to bits.

He also noted that it's not simply "free" vs. "paid" products and services, but rather free versions supported by advertising and "freemium" versions in which consumers and users pay to get something extra. What will people pay for? In Anderson's words...

People will pay to save time.
People will pay to lower risk.
People will pay for things they love.
People will pay for status.
People will pay if you make them (once they're hooked.)

The key opportunity created by offering your products and services for free is that "free allows you to fully explore your customer space... How do we use free to increase our audience [for Wired] and convert some of them to a higher price?" He noted that you can read Wired for free online, you can purchase single copies at newsstands for one price, and you can purchase a print subscription for yet another price. But why be limited to just three prices? "We need more prices... What is the $100 version of Wired?" Referring to the recent uproar over the Washington Post's plans to host a "salon" for health care lobbyists at $25,000 a head, Anderson noted, "That wasn't the right answer, but it's a really interesting question: What is the $25,000 version of the Washington Post?"

Appropriately, Anderson is offering "Free" at a range of prices: The hardcover book was $26.99 tonight (and it's $16.19 on Amazon as I write this.) Almost all digital versions of the book are free, but most come a with a variety of limits on how long you can access the materials. The unabridged version (6 hours) is free, but the abridged version (3 hours) is $9.99. (Now you know how Hyperion prices 3 hours of your time.)

And Anderson strongly believes in the future of books. Printed materials will survive to the extent that they add value to the online version of the same content. Anderson expects books, which are convenient for long-form content and "look nice on a shelf," to make it. He expects newspapers to die (or at least to be radically reinvented.) And magazines? They'll eventually be replaced by Apple's version of the Kindle, but the rich graphic experience they offer will keep many of them safe for now.

Anderson was asked about Malcolm Gladwell's dismissive review of "Free" in The New Yorker, in particular Gladwell's skewering of YouTube as a paragon of this new economic model. From Gladwell's review:

To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube's ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the "abundance thinking" that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

Anderson's not-quite-compelling response was that Gladwell underestimates the power of Google's economies of scale, his figures are off by a factor of 10, and "advertising always lags the audience" (i.e. they'll figure it out eventually.) To Anderson's credit, he deftly acknowledged and defused the issue of his apparently inadvertant plagiarism from Wikipedia in "Free" by telling his questioner, who had apologized for asking such a tough question, that there were much tougher questions he could have asked, which prompted a chuckle from the audience. A colleague said the Anderson-Gladwell dustup was "the nerd version of Biggie vs. Tupac." Outstanding. (I'll let him remain anonymous, unless he asks for attribution.)

I was reminded of my "attention economy" experience with AttentionTrust and others by Anderson's comment that the 'net and its attendant armies of bloggers, videographers and garage bands has yielded an overabundance of content, and today our attention is the truly scarce commodity. And just as many attention-focused projects touched on the related issues of reputation and identity, Anderson sees links there as well. He believes that "Facebook and Twitter are establishing the first quantifiable reputation markets," although I'd argue that groups like Rapleaf, Opinity and Trufina tried to do just that a few years ago, leveraging data from credit reports to eBay seller status.

Finally, one of Anderson's most interesting comments tonight was his assertion that "the key talent of the 21st century is self-promotion and creating celebrity...[and] the goal is to create celebrity, or reputation...and convert that into something that pays the rent." (On a cautionary note, he added, "And that business can be just as dirty as it sounds.")

Although one example of this is Paris Hilton and the "fame-for-being-famous" that she embodies, the openness of the Internet means that today anyone can at least get their ideas into the marketplace. That's no guarantee of success, of course--you'll still need some luck, even with good ideas and a talent for self-promotion. But as Anderson notes, we're now able to tap into "the long tail of talent... The Internet has lowered the transaction costs of finding talent...[and] talent will find a way."

This fascinates me as an executive coach, both on my own behalf and on behalf of my clients and students at Stanford Business School, because what Anderson is saying is that the rules are changing. We used to rely solely on personal networks and resume credentials to locate and identify talent (and to be located and identified by others as talent.) But in a more open marketplace of ideas, those filters are less and less useful as they screen out more "false negatives" (i.e. talented people unknown to us who lack traditional credentials) and allow through more "false positives" (i.e. people within our networks who possess traditional credentials but who aren't really all that talented.)

From a personal perspective, my writing on this site on coaching, leadership, change and related issues over the past few years has given me a reputation as someone with something of interest to say on these topics--a reputation that can be quantified in data such as my feed subscribers (932 today), my site visitors (192 so far today), even my Twitter followers (302 at the moment, enjoying all 105 of my tweets to date.) These aren't big numbers in any absolute sense, but they're big enough (particularly given how infrequently I post) to give me a sense that what I'm saying is being heard, a sense of presence.

Calling this reputation "celebrity" would be a serious stretch, but that's a matter of degree. And if you're interested in a topic such as "double-loop learning" or "ground rules for meetings" or the "definition of organizational effectiveness," you'll find me in Google's top 10 results for those terms (at least as of today), and that's certainly celebrity in a strange, narrow way. (Hell, if you're just interested in "ed batista" I'm #1!)

What's the connection with "Free"? Well, even though I don't post that often, the hours invested in my writing here over the past few years would add up to a substantial amount of unpaid time. And I publish everything here under a Creative Commons license that gives anyone the right to share and remix my materials as long as they attribute it to me with a link and make any resulting work freely available under the same license.

So free work and free content have been the essential elements in developing a verifiable reputation and an identity as a trusted subject matter expert in my field, and I don't know how I could have done it any other way. And seeing my own experience in this new light makes me wonder if I should be encouraging my clients and students to do more of the same.

Thanks to Chris Anderson for a thought-provoking and entertaining talk, and many thanks to Andrew Blau, Nancy Murphy and their colleagues at GBN for being such gracious hosts.

A Little Perspective

2009-07-08T17:44:43-07:00

My day was going badly. I'll spare you the details, but it involved traffic jams and missed phone calls and rescheduled meetings. I wasn't blaming anyone but myself (and the unknown forces behind all that traffic), but I was feeling increasingly annoyed with the world, and I still had another 40 minutes to go in the car. I could just tell that things were only going to get worse from here.

And then, in a moment of inspiration, I had a little dialogue with myself:

Do I need to continue down this path? Do I need to push on?

No.

Could I turn around and go home?

Yes.

OK, then. New plan for the day.

I was on 280 in San Bruno, and I took the next exit to turn around and return to San Francisco. As I pulled off I saw signs for Golden Gate National Cemetery, a huge facility that I've driven past more than a thousand times but have never visited--until today.

I took a short detour, passed through the gates and drove slowly up to the summit of a huge mound at the center of the cemetery. The view today was almost identical to the photo above (thank you, Pargon), although the Memorial Day flags were gone.

Looking out over the graves of 139,000 veterans was sobering, and it put my "bad day" in perspective pretty damn fast. It was blustery and sunny, weather that makes me feel very much alive. Being surrounded by the memories of so many people who had sacrificed their lives while I could stand there and enjoy the sun and the wind helped me see just how meaningless and insubstantial my problems were and how much I have to be grateful for.

So the first lesson I learned today was how easy it can be to simply stop and reverse course when things are not going well. Sometimes persistence is called for, and sometimes it's merely a failure to consider all your options.

And the second lesson was that even when things seem not to be going well, they really are. Really, they are.

Photo by Pargon.

A Week in Point Reyes

2009-07-03T12:08:22-07:00

Every year Amy and I try to get up to Point Reyes, and at the end of June we spent a week at a cottage up on the ridge in Inverness. We'd hike all day, pick up some amazing local produce (like Marin Sun Farms steaks), grill dinner on our back porch, and collapse, exhausted. And then do it all over again the following day.

One of our favorite hikes up there is the Tomales Point Trail. This stand of cypress is all that remains of the Lower Pierce Point Ranch, about 2/3 of the way from the trailhead to Tomales Bluff. I always wonder what it was like to live here 120 years ago:

We made it all the way to the end (9.4 miles out and back), and it was so satisfying to rest on the hillside, eat a simple lunch of Molinari salami, bread and water, and watch the loons and pelicans and an occasional seal. (Or sea lion--I never really know.)

The yellow lupine that looks so charming in the background was out of control this year. Chest-high and occasionally over our heads and sprawling across the last mile of the trail.

Later in the week we went out to Tomales Point again to hike down to McClure's Beach:

A great discovery this trip was the Estero Trail to Drake's Head (coincidentally, also 9.4 miles out and back.) We saw 4 people in a full day of hiking, and 2 of them were in the last 1/4 mile. (In addition to the cows scattered across this section of the park, we saw 2 coyotes, 2 mother deer with their fawns, scores of bat rays swimming in Drakes Estero, and a red dragonfly.) From the top of Drake's Head, 150 feet above the Limantour Estero:

Another new destination was Marshall Beach. You have to drive 2.5 miles of gravel road to reach the trailhead, and from there it's only a 1.5 mile hike down to the beach, but here's the view of Tomales Bay (the beach is nestled in among the pines at right):

As I learned last year, the four best happiness strategies for me are Increasing Flow Experiences, Taking Care of My Body, Practicing Acts of Kindness, and Expressing Gratitude. Although hiking isn't always challenging enough to be a flow experience, there were certainly stretches on the longer days where I felt a sense of meditative peace. It was a gloriously physical week, from the daily exertion to the deeply satisfying food. And although we were kind only to ourselves, I am profoundly grateful for the experience. (Thank you, Phil Burton.)

Cross-Cultural Communication: Individualism vs. Collectivism

2009-06-22T08:04:13-07:00

How do cultural differences affect communications across a cultural divide? Specifically, how does a culture's individual or collective orientation affect communications?

I've written before about the primary dimensions of cultural difference identified by Geert Hofstede. One of the key dimensions is individualism vs. collectivism, which Hofstede defines as follows:

The degree to which people in a country prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word 'collectivism' in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state.

In Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini talk about the impact of this cultural dimension on communications:

People from collectivistic and individualistic cultures tend to differ in the relative weight they give to two central functions of communication. In short, one function of communication is informational: When we communicate, we convey information to others. A second, less obvious function of communication is relational: When we communicate, we help build and maintain relationships with others. Although both functions are clearly important to people in all cultures, social psychologists Yuri Miyamoto and Norbert Schwarz argued that individualistic cultures place a greater emphasis on the informational function of communication, whereas collectivistic cultures place a greater emphasis on the relational function...

What do these findings say about influencing others within and outside the workplace? As we discussed in previous chapters, relationships are a key component to the persuasion process--but this is especially true with people from countries with collectivistic orientations... These results suggest that, when dealing with people from collectivistic cultures, it is particularly important to attend to aspects of the relationship that the two of you share...

These findings also suggest that we should be especially vigilant about providing such feedback with people from collectivistic cultures, letting them know that we're attending to the relationship that we share with them as well as to the information they're trying to convey.

A point I'd add is that within any national culture, there are innumerable sub-cultures associated with different regions, industries and even organizations. And these sub-cultures may differ substantially along the primary dimensions of cultural difference, including individualism vs. collectivism. So even--and perhaps especially--when communicating with someone from your own country, it's worth taking some time to understand where they fall along this spectrum and tailoring your communication style accordingly.

(In addition to the research by Yuri Miyamoto and Norbert Schwarz in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology referenced above, Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini also cite the work of Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon in Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach.)

Leading is Lonely and Other Thoughts

2009-06-19T23:39:00-07:00

I recently rediscovered these lines in a notebook from 2007:

Leading is lonely.

Information-gathering is not decision-making.

Position power is not influence.

When I wrote them I had just begun working with a number of prospective leaders among my students at Stanford, and I was reflecting on my own leadership experiences, particularly the period just after graduation from business school. At that time I went from reporting to an organization's leader (in my last job before school) to being a leader on my own, reporting directly to a Board of Directors, and these three lessons stand out among the many I learned the hard way.

Leading is lonely. Jan Masaoka, one of my founding Board members, warned me about the loneliness of leadership long before I actually felt it. If you're a leader at the head of an organization, by definition you don't have internal peers who share your perspective. Your Board of Directors isn't going to provide you with the developmental support you've enjoyed from previous mentors and managers--they're there to challenge you, not to nurture you. And your family is going to get tired of hearing about the challenges you face long before you get tired of talking about them. It's lonely. So establish and maintain a support network that'll be there for you when things get tough. Reach out to other leaders. Create a personal Board of Directors. (And/or do what I did and hire a coach!)

Information-gathering is not decision-making. In my last job before business school one of my primary tasks was to gather information, analyze it and make recommendations to the organization's leader. When I became a leader myself I continued this practice without fully understanding that it was no longer sufficient to allow me to move the organization forward. The right answers to the questions I faced weren't going to emerge from the data, because there were no "right" answers. The important questions I faced as a leader were sufficiently complex that no amount of data would ever be enough--I needed to rely on A) my judgment and B) my ability to execute. But before I came to this realization I spent a lot of wasted time and effort amassing more and more data hoping that the "right" answer would emerge. Rather than getting trapped in an information-gathering sinkhole, test your ability to get just enough data to allow you to exercise your judgment, and then execute your ass off to insure that the decision you made was the right one. Wash, rinse, repeat. (Honing your judgment is an iterative process!)

Position power is not influence. The authority that comes with any leadership position always looks more substantial from the outside. Once in the role, you realize how little you can accomplish by relying on position power, and how dependent you are on your ability to influence key stakeholders. If I knew then what I know now about influence, no doubt I would have been a more effective leader. But today I'd go even further and note that there's a wide range of influence strategies--9, according to the Hay Group--and the ones I tend to prefer aren't always the most effective in a given situation (and the ones I tend to avoid may be just what's called for.)

Photo by different2une. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Some Inspiration from Corey Ford

2009-06-19T17:36:37-07:00

One of the great satisfactions of being a coach is the opportunity to work with some truly extraordinary people who are seeking to experience as much as possible in life and to fulfill every ounce of their potential. Corey Ford, who's appeared here before, is one such person, and I enjoyed another thoughtful conversation with him yesterday.

I learned that back in March he'd been invited to give the keynote address at the annual banquet of the University of North Carolina's Morehead-Cain Scholars Program. The program--whose motto is "Create an extraordinary life"--offers high-potential students a four-year scholarship at Chapel Hill and access to a wide range of academic and professional resources. In his inspiring talk, Corey discusses how he made the most of this opportunity, and a few of his comments in particular stood out for me:

On becoming an entrepreneur: My Morehead-Cain experiences had allowed me to grow from a boy who energetically climbed the ladder placed before him to a man who started to build his own ladder.

On his decision to leave a high-profile job: I thought I was at the top. I thought I would be there for the rest of my career, but I faced a choice: Stay and stagnate, or make my own way.

On exploration: We all have unwritten endings. Life is a journey, but not a linear one. Just like design, innovation and entrepreneurship, in life there are times to focus and times to flare, times to execute and times to explore. Congratulations—it's time for you to explore.

Kudos, Corey--I know there are a lot of people at Stanford (and I'm sure at Chapel Hill) who are looking forward to hearing about the next steps in your own non-linear journey.

Self-Coaching Guides: Communication, Leadership, Motivation, Change, Learning and Happiness

2009-06-14T23:45:54-07:00

Several students I worked with in the Leadership Coaching class at Stanford this year raised the question of how to "self-coach" after graduation--how to continue the process of personal development without the resources of a graduate program at their disposal.

Much of the writing I've done here over the past 5 years has been aimed at helping people do just that, so I've created a series of "Self-Coaching Guides" on the topics of Communication, Leadership, Motivation, Change, Learning and Happiness.

I don't intend these brief guides to provide the definitive word on such expansive subjects, but hopefully they'll allow anyone with an interest in a given topic to do some focused reading and to learn more about the thinkers and resources I've found valuable.

(Note that the files linked to below are PDFs, which require Adobe reader, and they're fairly large, so access them over a fast connection.)

Self-Coaching Guide #1: Communication (PDF, 452 KB)

Self-Coaching Guide #2: Leadership (PDF, 301 KB)

Self-Coaching Guide #3: Motivation (PDF, 378 KB)

Self-Coaching Guide #4: Change (PDF, 397 KB)

Self-Coaching Guide #5: Learning (PDF, 564 KB)

Self-Coaching Guide #6: Happiness (PDF, 363 KB)

UPDATE: I'm finding that the six topics addressed here form a useful framework for personal development.

Photo by Nesher Guy. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.