Observed

If it weren’t for our relentlessly intentional inventiveness, I’d say that there was a lot of Zen in certain neologisms.

For example.  We’ve been waiting tens of thousands of years, apparently, to be able to hear the words lean in as we can now hear them.  While these two words  and their meanings –  as defined by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and polished by her tribes — have been around for a long time, they’ve been picked up, imbued with new energies and applied in ways that are inextricable from our zeitgeist.

This is one of the things I love about our language.  It has an elasticity that promotes new words and ways to express ourselves and engage one another.

It’s also one of the things I fear.  As an editor, one of my jobs is to sniff out the trendy, the trite and the overused and kill it (or, at least, challenge it) — no matter how culturally worthy the new usage might be.  If I mean to say politely assertive or self-empowered , then I ought to say politely assertive or self-empowered.

Because to fail to do this separates me from my reader.  I score points for my hipness at the expense of possibly separating me from readers who don’t care to shake anything.

The ancient Romans (and many other cultures) understood the importance of perspective to beginnings and transitions. That's one of the reasons they created Janus, the (sometimes mixed gender) diety with two faces, one looking to the past and the other to the future.

What clients want from their professional service providers is pretty well established.  According to many experts, when prospects visit your law firm or architectural practice’s Web site or pick up your brochure, they probably have three questions in mind:

1. Can you fix my problem?
2. Will you make my life easier?
3. Will I like working with you?

Despite abundant evidence of this buyer’s perspective, a lot (no, most) of the marketing content I see (especially from law firms) puts the focus on the provider’s or the firm’s credentials instead of on the client’s needs.

Kon Leong, on the other hand, gets it.  He’s the co-founder, president and chief executive of ZL Technologies, an e-mail and file archiving company based in San Jose, Calif.  Here’s how he described his approach in a recent New York Times “Corner Office” interview:

One of my early jobs was selling computer hardware. What I learned about selling was probably more valuable than my M.B.A. I had seen selling as a process just about logic. Then I realized that has nothing to do with it.

You have to present your story in their context, not yours. They don’t really care if you’re standing on top of a robot and quoting equations. If they’re in the deep part of the forest, you’ve got to talk the language of the deep forest.

So, demonstrate (through case studies and the like) that you’ve solved your clients’ problems.  Demonstrate — don’t merely assert — that you care about client satisfaction by interviewing and surveying your clients…and then publishing the results.  And tell your readers what you’re like and what you do in your spare time, instead of treating this kind of Web content as something beneath you.

The film "Undefeated" won the 2012 Best Documentary Oscar, despite its rejection in 2011 by the Sundance Film Festival. The filmmakers' resiliency (they got the boost they needed from the South by Southwest conference) is the same kind of resourcefulness it takes out-numbered attorneys to Get Found and Get Picked.

The parallels between marketing a film and selling professional services ought to be obvious.

First, in either case, the numbers are apparently against you. A recent report in The New York Times, for example, noted that the Sundance Film Festival which begins today in Park City, Utah, vetted over 12,000 submissions for 193 slots. By comparison, I read recently that there are 1,250,000 attorneys in the United States competing for increasingly demanding markets less tolerant of hourly billings and other examples of business as usual.

Second, despite the numbers, there’s hope. If history is a reliable guide, many of the films that didn’t make the cut at Sundance will nevertheless earn critical and commercial success. Same with attorneys and other professional service providers who play it smart.

The Times piece describes the advice John Cooper, the director of the Sundance festival, has for the ways rejected films have skillfully used the Internet and other means to build an audience — Sundance or no Sundance.  Responding to a rejected filmmaker’s plans to offer his work via sites like iTunes or Netflix, the Times reported the following:

That’s a resourcefulness that Mr. Cooper would encourage. “Filmmakers need to be creative,” he said. “They should use the cleverness it takes to make a movie to also find an audience.”

This common-sense attitude is precisely what Mike O’Horo and other legal sales thought leaders have been offering their clients for years.  They say that lawyers are — by training or nature — relentless question-askers.  Lawyers also tend to be painstakingly systematic, analytical, well-prepared and hard-working and have a bunch of other qualities that serve business development and sales of their services and firms.

Makes sense, yes?

Ancient cultures were obsessed with tracking and measuring time long before Simon Vouet's 1627 "Time Vanquished by Love, Hope & Beauty." But in the business world, to manage something, you have to measure it.

Phyllis Korkki, who reports on workplace issues for The New York Times, recently tag-teamed with Robert Pozen to challenge the notion that putting in more hours is a sign of productivity and value.

Pozen, a former attorney who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a lecturer at Harvard Business School, is the author of Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours (HarperCollins).

Among other benefits, Korkki offers that regular breaks not only reduce stress but also amp up creativity.  In a second, related Times article, Pozen echoes what law firms have been hearing with increased frequency and sincerity from clients for at least a decade:  Measure results, not hours.

He says there are three things most of us could do to significantly boost our efficiency: Run better meetings, read smarter and let go of our Inner Perfectionists as writers.

This last point reminded me of what my friend Mike O’Horo calls DemandTrigger — the business need that helps drive a sale.  In my case, I might write for a living, but what I sell (i.e., my Demand Trigger) is time management.

As in, let me get that off your to-do list.

Because chances are good that every busy, high-earning lawyer or other executive has some writing chore on their desk that they keep putting off.  It’s simply competing with too many other priorities for which the Cost of Doing Nothing (thanks again, Mike) is less than finishing or editing that article-practice group description-proposal or whatever.

But, hey, who’s counting?

Even without two of the most beautiful Beautiful People ever (actors Julie Christie and Omar Sharif), it would be pretty easy to sympathize with Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova.  Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel had these two characters (and others) endure rape, frostbite, sword hacking, stampedes, starvation and the Ukranian Front.

In addition to all of that, our protagonists had to deal with a bunch of cranky Bolsheviks.  To wit:

What could possibly make these revolutionaries feel so fed up?  Or, turn to the communist model?  Drive Soviet-made cars?

I found an answer in the Nov. 2, 2012, New York Times.  Writing about her family’s downsizing (from “a 4,000-square-foot, 10-room apartment in a prewar building on Park Avenue” to a “space on the edge of Chinatown that I could imagine myself living in: an approximately 2,200-square-foot duplex loft with a terrace and mesmerizing views of a quaint street in Little Italy, a sliver of the Brooklyn Bridge towers and the Frank Gehry skyscraper under construction in Lower Manhattan”), here’s part of what Suzanne Slesin had to say for herself:

But I would be moving to a place that had a fraction of the display and storage space to which I was accustomed. We put our uptown apartment on the market, and I truly believed that I could live with the sparer aesthetic the downtown space seemed to cry out for.

Of course, I had my untouchables: the pastel-hued Russel Wright dinnerware; a set of antique gold-rimmed red china; the Victorian silver and vintage Bakelite frames that held decades of family photographs; a pair of huge urns from Fez; a large 1950s fish platter I had spied in the window of a shop in the Palais Royal in Paris; and the groups of ceramic Chinese People’s Republic revolution figures. (I particularly enjoyed seeing the Chinese workers rub shoulders with an antique Meissen figurine of Marie Antoinette that had been a fixture in my parents’ living room.) But I also dreaded the thought that some things would not make the move, and the idea of downsizing started to bother me more than I cared to admit. Moving is stressful enough, and as I happen to be rather sentimental, the idea of parting with things like my mother’s banquet-size damask tablecloths, a group of her old perfume bottles (still in their ribboned boxes), my collection of 1940s “ugly vases” and even my children’s long-discarded toys — even if I could not possibly use them in our new loft — brought me close to tears. I bravely decided to have a private yard sale in the apartment; little did I guess that some of our oldest and closest friends would haggle over my fissured Ironstone platters, ruby-colored wine goblets and antique monogrammed guest towels.

Wow.

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.

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.

Sportswriter Greg Bishop put on a clinic for bloggers in this morning's New York Times. Of course, it didn't hurt that UofL won. Go, Cards!

There are 357 really good words in this morning’s New York Times. They’re in a story about a college basketball game that happened yesterday in Portland, Ore., between the men’s teams from New Mexico and Louisville.

Here’s what I like about Greg Bishop’s report:

1. Brevity. If I believe what Jakob Nielsen and others say about our on-line attention span, Bishop made the first 120 words really matter.  They get the reader through the essential facts — who, what, where, when and why.
2. Engaging. In addition to the basics, Bishop gives us a splash of color…just to be engaging.
3. Well-structured. Bishop gets us in, creates a sense what it might have been like to be at the game, and then he gets us out.  Gracefully.

Think about that last word.  We make fun of TV and radio “sportscasters” and their tortured, clumsy, florid language manglings.  They’ve given a bad name, I’m sad to say, to the legacy of writers such as Red Barber, Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice and Ernest Hemingway.

Notice how Bishop captured the drama of a senior’s desire to get back in the game despite his injury, finishing his collegiate career, while “Louisville instead moved on.”

Or, how Bishop passed along the feeling when the Cardinals center “…took a pass and slammed home a dunk [which took the wind out of New Mexico's sails and] …effectively ended the Lobos’ season.”

I’m sure Bishop could have given us thousands of words about the game yesterday.  Thousands of good words.  But, he didn’t need them.

A tech novelties article caught my eye the other day.  I found Anne Eisenberg’s coverage of on-line dictionaries (think Worknik) fascinating for how it reminded me of the humanness of language.

(It also hit me that the editors of The New York Times placed an article about words on the Business page.  Yeah, I know, it was really a tech piece.  It also underscored — in my mind, at least — the importance of good writing to good business.  Just saying.)

I noticed the tension between Web purists like Wordnik’s founder, Erin McKean, and Old Schoolers who admonish writers not to lean too far into the Internet.

Example?  Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, likes Wordnik’s oceans of words and word associations.  On the other hand, Nunberg says,

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy.

“Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

Then again, Wordnik (launched in June 2009) has raised almost $13 million in VC so far and has business partners on the hook.  Somebody’s leaning.