Less is more

You’ve heard the saying all your life, but the truth of it comes home to you in the oddest of times. For me, that was when I started online dating after divorce and it was a brutal and unforgiving lesson that less truly is more. There is nothing more personal than marketing yourself!

To put it simply, the more detail provided in a lady’s profile, the more likely I was to reject the person. What was happening?

What I found was that as I read through the detail I was actually going through what in any other context would be called the buying process. You look at a person’s likes, dislikes, favourite TV shows, etc. and see if you match up. The more specific they were, the more likely I was to rule them out.

Let me give you a couple of example profile– totally made up, based on the many I saw of course – so you can see what I mean.

Female 35, never married, no children. Non-smoker, social drinker.

I am looking for the love of my life. I look forward to spending our evenings and weekends together, going hiking, skiing and to add a bit of spice to a relationship for the occasional burlesque show.

I enjoy travel, and have been to 32 countries so far. My favourite places to visit are Bangkok and Paris. I could spend several weeks each year taking in the lifestyle in the Loire Valley or at Lake Como.

I speak four foreign languages (French, Italian, Spanish and Swahili) as well as playing the guitar and the piano.

I like going to art galleries when it is raining, and will always be found in the sun when it isn’t raining. Do you like extreme sports? I do.

I like catching up with friends, and having pets as a part of my life is a must. You have to like cats to be part of my life.

I go to the gym several times a week, and am considered an awesome aunt by my 15 nephews and nieces.

I look forward to meeting you soon.

See what I mean with this one. The ‘hypothetical’ lady in question is putting up information that relates to her lifestyle as a single, things she did when she was younger that she might no longer do, and several contradictory messages. She may be even putting up things she has tried once or likes the idea of but which aren’t part of her life. I am sure the male equivalents were doing the same.

While it is pretty easy to screen this person out, however, they may in fact be quite different to their profile and highly compatible with you.

Try this one instead.

Female 35, never married, no children. Non-smoker, social drinker.

I’m looking for a companion for life. Someone to be there when I come home from a hard day at work. Someone to care for me and someone for me to care for no matter what comes.

I am interested in starting a family if I can and am looking for the same in a partner. I would be pleased to hear from you if you have children.

I look forward to hearing from you

This could be the same person, but without all the verbiage. What this gets right is the core values and wishes, and recognises that the detail is something you will work out when you meet the person. Compatibility isn’t reduced to a list of attributes.

Simply put, when there is less of a description, you imagine the rest, and are a bit intrigued to know more.

The same applies to business and marketing.

I am fascinated by the websites of top cloud services such as Dropbox and Asana. They have a simple splash page, very little description, and a few FAQ, plus pricing. Basically they want you to try it, so give you enough detail to think that their product might be good for your purposes, but not so much that you don’t try it out.

Your customers are also looking at you in the same way. They will look for certain categories of service or products, but then if you provide too much detail they will go to an alternate vendor.

What you want your client to do is to get in touch and initiate the sales and negotiation process. You might well be able to fulfill their needs, but if your website or promo literature has specific lists and you don’t mention what they want they are more likely to dismiss your company.

When the customer gets in touch you can have more technical details or information available to suit their questions. But, don’t give that all upfront. Make it implicit in the fact that your company offers services or products in that category.

A good example I know from a highly experienced architecture and construction company is that they never put concept drawings or any form of visualisation into the tender package for any bid they enter. The reason is simple, the client may hate the building concept, and then reject a perfectly good bid.

Another trick is to bundling services and only providing a few choices for your customers. Web developers do this. They bundle graphic design and web hosting as a compulsory component, then base the pricing on the level of graphic design and feature sets. By limiting choices you make things simple and may elicit a buy response in the face of confusing offerings from competitors.

For service companies, I’d recommend online profiles of your people be limited to a description of one paragraph at most, and consider eliminating profiles altogether as it makes you look like a small company. That plus customers may read your profile and decide they don’t like you.

Make your marketing about the product or service and what it means for the client. You are not important except that you will need to deliver and may need to prove your ability and bona fides later in the buying process.

The three key outcomes you achieve with the less is more approach are:

• You retain the flexibility to offer solutions that match their needs by not being prescriptive.
• You don’t ‘talk back the sale’ through excessive detail, and you keep choices simple.
• It can funnel customers into engaging with you in the sales process rather than making up their minds without getting in touch.

Destined to learn things the hard way

The longer I am in business and working with many different companies, the more I am convinced that most of us are destined to learn things the hard way – from our own mistakes and those of others.

Text books are full of the wisdom and knowledge of those who have learned the hard way, but it seems that despite all our studies those lessons aren’t fully taken on board. It is one thing to say how something works in principle, but it is much harder to apply that to your day to day working life.

Likewise, by instituting best practice systems and processes you are assuming that all the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is in the system. However, if your people don’t understand this, then their motivation becomes gaming the system to get the outcomes they see as best, rather than using the system to achieve the best outcomes for the company.

Have a look around and you too will recognise learning by doing is one of the fundamental paths to becoming good at what you do. That’s all good and well I can hear you say, but how can we take this approach and put it into practice.

The fundamental step is to recognise that when we start our careers we see parts of the job, but not the whole, and we definitely don’t understand how it all comes together. I know one international construction firm that explicitly recognises this.

This firm puts its new staff in at the deep end. They use these new staff to provide all the disciplines required for a job, but they put them on a small job worth a few million dollars as opposed to the hundreds of millions to billions for a major role. By being given responsibility, accountability and support/mentoring these junior staff rapidly learn how to, and how not to do things. They mature faster and understand how everything fits together faster.

By giving such trust to your people you are also encouraging them to be high performers. You also have the added benefit of creating a team who can progress together through the organisation.

The key lesson from this is that to help your people develop mastery of their profession provide a safe way for them to learn – a sandpit to play in if you like.

This lesson is lost when there is a lot of work on. This is particularly evident in Australia right now where a variant of learning by doing is in place – survival of the fittest.

Given the large amount of resource industry projects happening in Australia at the moment and the shortage in skilled and professional workers, there is a tendency to grab anyone who looks competent and throw them straight in the deep end by putting them in charge of a job. All too often these well-meaning people are performing to the best of their ability, but they have limited skills in management, budgeting, project controls, legals, commercials and all the other skills they need. Such skillsets are acquired through learning and practice and are often far outside the experiences of most people. Universities are manifestly failing to produce graduates with such skillsets.

In such situations you get bad commercial outcomes, poor project delivery, cost and time blowouts, and a failure to recognise your own commercial rights and claim them. The human capital damage is pretty high too. I have seen good people have breakdowns at being given responsibility. The higher the budget they are responsible for, the worse their anxiety and performance becomes. Even worse, those who tend to fearlessly thrive in such an environment are sociopathic by inclination which may not work out well for your company as such characters tend to ruthlessly overwork their own team and destroy relations with contractors and the client.

Survival of the fittest can work to a degree, but it ignores the fact that if you train people up over time, then you can have a lot more competent people available in the workforce than if you just throw people into major jobs in a situation that is beyond their capability.

If you really can’t afford to take the time to train your own people up, then I recommend that if you have critical role then hire for people who have a proven record in that area. Enthusiasm, qualifications and a can do attitude are manifestly inadequate.

Further steps would also include the following.

Mini-startups - Be brave, consider setting up a mini-startup in your company. Give the vision, budget and resources to a group to try something new, or to deliver a project. They will learn more from that process than all the procedure manuals in the world.

Strong leadership is vital - Make sure your team pulls together instead of going off in their own directions. High performing teams tend to be full of strong minded individuals. You need strong leadership in place to keep them going in the same direction and keep them from taking an axe to each other.

Provide optimism and hope - There is not a project or product development in the world that doesn’t hit rough patches. You may know from experience that you can get through it, however, less experienced staff may look at the amount of work to be done before a deadline and simply give up, or go off on a tangent. Destructive mentalities and gossip can start. Even worse, the blame game can commence. You should provide that overarching calming effect rather than engaging in a “Lord of the Flies” type experiment.

Vocational training is important - University education is good, however, vocational training is every bit as important. Competencies in job roles, software usage or other areas important for productivity and job mastery need to be learned through vocational training. Universities don’t teach this stuff, and you shouldn’t rely on people teaching themselves these skills.  As part of your training and development plan I would highly recommend the inclusion of vocational training providers.

Recognising that our working lives involve constantly acquiring new skills in order to be productive and implementing training and initiatives to allow learning by doing is an important first step for your company’s growth.

Start planning for the futility of planning

Planning is essential for the survival of companies. It helps set the course for the company and provides a template for how to retain customers and hopefully grow the business. Unfortunately, a lot of planning is around resource allocation and communication, which is fine in itself, but doesn’t take into account the most important issues in long term survival, which are mostly beyond the control of the company.

The things we don’t talk about are exemplified by the following.

Technical obsolescence - a new technology or process is available that undercuts your company’s products.

Change in competitor landscape - unforseen competition from larger competitors – domestic or international.

For example, during times of economic downturn many large consulting and professional services firms start taking on the jobs that small firms would normally do at the cost of keeping their staff employed. This effectively kills many small firms.

Alternatively, a well established player from another market (e.g. China, India, Brazil, etc.) can come in to your market and upset things.

Slump in demand – e.g. demand is weak due to the state of the economy, or customers saving rather than spending due to a fear of losing their jobs in a recession.

Political risk - Regulatory interference is another killer. Projects take longer to be approved. More administration is required for compliance leading to higher costs. Your industry sector could be specifically targeted by government. Legal rulings can have a similar effect.

Unknown unknowns - totally unforeseen and non-predictable events can also kill a company. For example, with the recent revelations that the US NSA is effectively spying on a lot of global internet traffic, many non-US users of US cloud based services are rethinking their patronage of such services. In this case a sudden drop in customer numbers could kill a good company almost overnight.

Mixed in with all the above is a decent amount of research which tends to show that the survival of a company over a 10 year period is a random outcome so long as the company has passed through the formative years of startup.

To put that in its starkest form, it is the factors beyond your control that will make or break your company in most circumstances. All the systems and the process you have in place are about delivering what products and services you already have profitably. Research shows that better systems and processes are really about fiddling the edges. You may achieve slightly better results than your competitors but it isn’t a major factor in the longevity of your company.

So, having said all that, what can we do? How do we plan for things we can’t plan for.

Establishing resilience is the recent terminology being used. Obviously it consists of simple things like having enough savings to push on through a downturn and having a broad enough customer base to lose some and keep going.

Less obviously, resilience also means evolution – adapting to a change in environment. Plan for obsolescence. Set up a group of thirty somethings with the task of working out how to put your current business out of business. Then when they work it out, make that your new business strategy, and consider putting them in charge.

Work your senior management and Board hard. They have learned how to do business based on the conditions that occurred in the past. Many will have little ability to deal with the rapid changes in technology and marketplace occurring now and could insist on staying the course when they shouldn’t. A good example here in Australia was the utter failure of the Fairfax media group to come to grips with internet based competition.

While business common sense is hard won over many years, your leadership team may no longer understand the business and economic environment they are applying that common sense to.

You will need to educate them, and dare I say it, you will need to plan to replace them as the business changes. If they don’t get it they shouldn’t stay in the role. Having grey haired figures on the Board may make bankers and pension fund investors happy, but it may also be the seed that kills your company.

Scenario planning is another good option. Have a think about what would happen if things dramatically changed for your market or your business. What could you do about it? Can you plan for some of those things now? Work out where you are most fragile and look to fix that if you can.

There are no easy answers and much of the above goes against human nature- which is to not admit anything is wrong until it has happened, but it is worth at least planning for some time to think about that which can’t be planned for.