Observed

By now, you probably know how Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist solved the disappearance of Harriet Vanger in Steig Larson’s enormously popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or, you’ve seen Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne piece together his past, trying to overcome his amnesia.

These tech-savvy characters lean heavily into the analog to see what they might not otherwise see.  Bourne carries a notebook with him, jotting down remembrances as if to make them better stick to his consciousness.  Blomkvist and Salander cover the walls of their cottage with clippings, photographs and more — all to supplement what Henrik Vanger refers to as Blomkvist’s “…keen investigative mind.” (Go to 2:32 of the following.)

I thought of these fictional characters and others when I read the latest about Evernote.  That’s the app that captures and syncs your hand-written journals, images and other jottings into something that can be shared, stored and processed across various digital platforms.

All of this reminds me of the power of the tangible to help the human mind gain perspective that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

It also reminds me of the nature of technology as a solution in relentless search of a problem.

The New York Times’s Phyllis Korkki recently reported several reasons why we still prefer paper over computer screens. In Defense of the Power of Paper outlines three top advantages:

1. Because paper’s “in your face,” we’re more prone to act on whatever it calls us to do.  Unlike a digital document, we can’t merely click it away.
2. A paper printout offers a better way to read and comprehend the geography of a long, complex argument or set of complex facts.
3. A tangible message invites both the writer and the reader to slow down and contemplate.

Makes sense.

I’ll add that the analog is also a better way than digital to promote closer, stronger relationships.  When I take the time to write and mail a personal note — even a short one — I demonstrate that I care.  When I do that, I set myself apart in a good and more memorable way.

So, when I connect tangibly with another person, I’ve not only worked on the Get Found side of the marketing/business development side of the equation, but I’ve also shifted onto the Get Picked side…the one where emotions and trust factor in.

Mari Smith gets it.

The ability to call up and get a real human being — the companies who can do that and go back to basics are really the ones that will be winning out and humanizing their brand.

The social media consultant was quoted yesterday in a New York Times piece about how big, tech companies like Google have ditched their phones.

As things currently stand, momentum is shifting toward impersonal digital and away from person-to-person analog.  This often boils down to numbers, with hundreds of thousands of customers (or more; think Facebook) funneling down into a relative handful of employees available for tech support or customer service.

Plus, there’s culture.  More and more of us — especially the younger us, asocial programmers and others in Generation Asperger — who just really Not Like the phone.  Or talking.  To another human being.

Ironic, considering how enamored we seem to be with the notion of story telling.

PS:  It’s not hard at all to find reporter Amy O’Leary on the World Wide Web.  She wrote the Times piece on tech companies and telephone use.  I’ll give a prize, however, to anyone who can find her phone number.

Before someone might hire me, they have to trust me.

1. Trust that I can fix their problem.
2. Trust that I can make their life easier.
3. Trust that they’ll like working with me.

Before they can trust me for any of these things, I have to demonstrate that I can be trusted.  There are a bunch of other ingredients and nuances, but that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

What are some of the ways I can demonstrate that I’m trustworthy?  A resume is just table stakes.  Plus, even a sparkling resume, five-star testimonials and the like don’t really establish the kind of trust that I believe clients want.

I’m talking about the type of trust that includes an emotional connection.

The key word here is demonstrate.  The more tangible, the more personal, the better.  Because when I demonstrate that I care by sacrificing time or something else, I help establish a personal emotional connection — which is what is most likely to get me hired.

That’s why I was totally blown-away when I recently bought shoes from Zappos.

Things started out simply enough.  After going to the company’s Web site to buy a cool pair of black Keen loafers, I ended up on the phone with Christian, a customer service rep in Hendersonville, Nev., to close the deal.

Now, I like to gab.  So, I asked her, “Where are you?” and “What kind of shoes are you wearing?” and what have you.  Nosy meets voluble.

Well, I not only bought the shoes, I had a good time.  Best time I’ve ever had on the phone that didn’t involve…well, never mind.

(NOTE:  My shoes arrived THE NEXT DAY.   Zappos has its warehouse about half an hour away from me in Shepherdsville, Ky.)

As a first-time custie, I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.  A few days after I got my shoes, a small envelop arrived from Zappos with a Nevada postmark.  IT WAS A HANDWRITTEN THANK-YOU NOTE FROM CHRISTIAN.

I felt like a schoolboy.  For about 15 seconds.  Which was when I Googled “Zappos handwritten notes.”

That turned up an excellent post by Stan Phelps, “Zappos and the Importance of Making a Personal Emotional Connection:  PEC in the form of Thank You Cards.”  Phelps explains that what Christian did — on the phone and afterward — is typical of the customer service branding practiced by all 1500 Zappos employees.

From now on, I plan on buying all of my shoes from Zappos.  And, I’m so asking for Christian.

How does a rainmaker make it rain?  How do these dinosaurs manage to walk into a room and suddenly, magically seem to own it…and leave with a satchelful of new clients?

First, there’s nothing sudden or magical about it.  In all likelihood, it has taken:

• Years of hard work. Mike O’Horo, Malcolm Gladwell and lots of others have spoken about the years of constant practice it takes to master anything — including business development.
• Vulnerability. Along the way, that means kissing a lot of frogs.  The typical rainmaker has become conditioned to dislike taking the hit (at least a little) and doing it anyway.

There’s more.  And, sure, there are the exceptions, the tireless extroverts who edited the law review, thrive on rejection and delegate easily.

A silver bullet?

For now, however, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no silver bullet.  It’s not, as O’Horo and Dave Waldschmidt argue, about working smarter.  “To grow your book,” Mike wrote, “you must get out there and compete.”

Which brings me to Frank Bruni and Phil Libin.  The former writes for The New York Times, and the latter is the autocrat founder in charge of Evernote, a company that peddles note-taking and archiving technologies.

Mr. Bruni recently noted that under-25s had better pick more marketable college majors and get some help making the mountain of debt many take on look more like a molehill.  Otherwise unemployment or underemployment in their ranks will continue to top 50 percent (according to the Associated Press based on 2011 data).

What he and his hundreds of commenters (as many as I had time to read) failed to mention, however, is that finding work also takes time, hard work and a bunch of flexibility.  Especially the most rewarding kinds of work.

As for Mr. Libin, he boasts that he banished landlines on a whim when he set up shop in Mountain View, Calif., in 2008.  (The company also has an office in Austin, Texas.)  He says,

We thought, why do you really need a phone?  If you have a phone at your desk, it’s just sitting there and you’re kind of encouraging people to talk on it.  Everyone’s got a cellphone, and the company pays for the plans.  There are phones in the conference room.  We’re not a sales organization, so we’re not making a lot of calls, either.  If you’re at your desk, you should be working.  And that’s actually worked really well. I don’t think anyone misses phones.   Even though it’s one big room, it’s actually fairly quiet because no one is sitting there talking at their desk. The culture very much is that if you want to talk, you go 10 or 20 feet in some direction to a quiet area.

Hey, I have news for anybody who buys the bit about we’re not a sales organization.  We’re ALL sales organizations.

First, we all have relationships inside and outside the company with people we’d better be treating as if they were our customers…or, we’d better be OK kissing those relationships good-bye.  And second, no one can express or accurately read the range of emotions it takes to sustain a relationship without hearing a voice and, even better, seeing a face…in person.  At least occasionally.

Add these up and you get sales.

Ramping up to a point about competitive advantage

Banishing landlines — and the conversations that they nurture — is nothing new or surprising.  Mr. Libin just happens to be one of the more flamboyant examples of the digitally cocooned of our times.  (He also deploys a robot surrogate with telepresence when he’s not in the office.)

In a recent article, Sherry Turkle recounts a scene in a Boston law office described by a senior partner.

Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.”  With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

Ms. Turkle, an MIT professor and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, also notes that we “seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.”

As Ms. Turkle notes, “Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience.”

The silver lining in this cloud (finally!)

In a world that texts and wears headphones (or earbuds), fortune favors the exception, anyone willing and able to pick up a phone and carry on a conversation.

So, that’s how.  That’s how (OK, one of the hows) a rainmaker gets to be (and to stay) a rainmaker.

PS:  If you have some thoughts about how, I’d love to know.  Call me.

OK, granted, you’re probably not writing for fans of Fergie or will.i.am.  Work with me anyway, because I see a connection between the digital freneticism of the Black Eyed Peas and your visitors’ non-linear distractability.

If your goal is to get read (much less, remembered), keep your content short.  Probably under 250 words for anything you might consider a page — such as a bio, practice group description, About Us…or, this blog post.

The Nielsen Effect is why.  As in Jakob Nielsen, a Danish software engineer considered to be one of the foremost user experience gurus.

Nielsen and others have found, for starters, that we read online content 25 percent slower than we read the same content in hard copy.  As Nielsen characterizes this and other Web visitor behaviors,

“[U]sers are selfish, lazy and ruthless.”

Here’s a still-timely 2008 Michael Agger post that explains this and more…including the average user’s unwillingness to scroll.

Distractable

We’re addicted to Anything But This.  I check Facebook, listen to BEP on YouTube, look out the window, tweet something…etc., blah.  You?  It’s not in the DSM (yet), but some psychologists label it Fear of Missing Out.

And, my sense is that it’s in our DNA.  That we survived on the ocean or in the jungle or on the savannah or prairie by being hyper-alert and hyper-vigilant.

In other words, we didn’t have the luxury of The Long.  So, Keep It Short.

Newt Gingrich's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination seems undeterred by his campaign to sell his books. He and wife Calista often drive their handlers crazy by spending time signing books instead of stumping for votes. Or, are those the same things?

Doesn’t it make perfect sense that 2011 holiday book sales are strong…despite the growing popularity of electronic reading; or, perhaps, because of it?  Or, despite the loss of bankrupt Borders’s 650 stores from the retail mix?

Books — real books — are tangible.  All the better to put under the Christmas tree or hand to someone special as a gift.

And, to show that you care. Really care.

Retailers and publishers report, by the way, that sales of non-fiction titles are the strongest sector in their industry.  In addition, big, expensive books seem to be a niche unaffected by the recession or worries about online competition.

Personal calendars have roots in common with the secular timekeeping that flourished in the 15th Century in places like Piazza San Marco. Watches eventually joined these highly visible and audible clocks in helping us be where we needed to be, when we needed to be there. Do tangible, analog calendars respond to the same urge to be mindful?

There’s an interesting piece in this morning’s New York Times about our current calendar-keeping preferences.  Well, I’ve used both digital and analog — at different times — and know the advantages and disadvantages of both first-hand.

I’ve migrated back to an analog week-at-a-glance, and here’s something I’ve noticed that the Times barely touches on:

A hard-copy calendar helps me stay much more mindful of the what, who, when and where of my life.

When I have a tactile connection with my calendar, I have a level and type of awareness that I lack when my stuff is in the clouds — literally and figuratively.

It’s a feeling that reminds me of the difference we experience when we read a book or article on-line as opposed to spread out in front of us.  I’ve heard that the average reader reads 25 percent slower on-line, perhaps because it takes more time, energy and focus to be mindful on-line.

Seth suggests asking yourself this before hitting Send: Am I "taking advantage of the asymmetrical nature of email--free to send, expensive investment of time to read or delete?"

Of Seth’s 36 Questions To Ask Before You Send An E-mail, my favorite was Number 32:

If this is a press release, am I really sure that the recipient is going to be delighted to get it? Or am I taking advantage of the asymmetrical nature of email–free to send, expensive investment of time to read or delete?

Of course, this applies to IMs, Twitter and other digital platforms, yes?

Not that this would have done Anthony Weiner much good.  After all, making a stupid choice doesn’t make him stupid, does it?

Yet, too many of us (me included) would be smart to slow down, read the rest of Seth’s list and consider the following in addition:

1. How important is this relationship?
2. What does this client prefer?
3. How much is it worth to stand out?
4. Is it really either/or?
5. Is anybody there?

George H.W. Bush understood the importance of superficial impressions. In 1988, he used this picture of a hapless Michael Dukakis to win the presidential election. Bush's fabled campaign ads featuring escaped felon and murderer "Willie Horton" drove the final nail in his opponent's coffin.

We’re hard-wired to judge others.  And situations.  Some of us (e.g., parents of young children) seem to acquire this urge under the right circumstances.

Judging others factors into how much we trust and feel safe.  This is one reason why chemistry and even small, tangible details seem to figure into the hiring choices clients make and whether they remain satisfied with a vendor’s performance.

So, too, it seems when picking presidential candidates.  A recent story in The New York Times vetted several Republican favorites with an eye toward how they present the qualities it takes to win as opposed to govern. (more…)