Dorie Clark's Blog

Do You Have the Right Tools to Succeed?

A while back, I had coffee with a former athletic company executive and mentioned how often I sprain my ankle playing squash. “But aren’t you wearing squash shoes?” he asked incredulously. I admitted I wasn’t; I assumed the existence of “squash shoes” was only a branding scam. Alas, it turns out that they – unlike regular sneakers – are optimized to protect you during horizontal movement across the court. Humbled, and with the right equipment, I haven’t hurt my ankle since.

I thought I had all the facts – I was being a savvy consumer, avoiding the corporate spin that dictated a different shoe for every sport. Instead, I was wrong, and injured myself more than once as a result. Sometimes, we need certain equipment or skills to succeed – and literally can’t make a go without them. So it’s worth it for every businessperson to ask: do you have the tools you need to succeed? You can start with three questions:

Do I know what tools are required?Do the tools I need exist – or can I invent them?Am I willing to embrace the necessary tools?

Do I know what tools are required?

Retrospectively, I should have sought out a squash pro at the outset to help me strategize about equipment. Similarly, it’s worth it for you to approach your boss or senior mentors and get their opinion about what you need to thrive at your company. What do they wish they’d known? What would they have done differently? If the path to the C-suite is through a global assignment, it’s not a bad idea to start those Mandarin lessons now. And if everyone else is using a particular tool or skill – whether it’s a productivity app, a methodology like Six Sigma, or (in my case) squash shoes – you should at least investigate it before assuming you know better.

Do the tools I need exist – or can I invent them?

The New Yorker recently profiled a well-known Charleston chef, Sean Brock, who set out to reinvent Southern cooking by bringing back “heritage ingredients” that have fallen out of favor, from Ossabaw hogs to heirloom rice. But Brock quickly realized that in order to fulfill his vision, he’d have to do more than just cook. Because the crops had largely disappeared since 1980 – the victim of changing tastes and the rise of Big Agriculture – he also needed to take an active role in farming and animal husbandry. “I’ve dedicated my life to this craft,” he said, “and they can’t give me the tools to do it right.” So he had to create them for himself.

Odds are, you won’t have to take up seed conservation in order to succeed at your career. But you may have to get creative. Let’s say you feel frustrated about the lack of interdepartmental communication at your company. If there’s an existing channel to leverage, great - but if not, why not invent one and make yourself the information hub? If there are particular skills or training you’d like to have but HR is falling short, why not organize a study group and spread that knowledge throughout the company? Taking decisive action to obtain the right tools can send a strong message about your leadership abilities.

Am I willing to embrace the necessary tools?

You’ll always get a better result in the end if you use the right tools. But it’s also more onerous along the way. Who wants to go out in the snow to get the exact screwdriver or drill bit, when you can usually find a semi-passable workaround? And who wants to expend the time and energy to learn how to touch type (even if it means you can write your memos 10x faster), take an intercultural communication class (even if it means you’ll relate better to the Bangalore office), or set up a blog (because it means you’ll actually have to write blog posts)?

Stepping up and owning your professional development entails some sacrifice. It’s so much easier to make do with what you’re given, and grumble that the folks in IT haven’t given you the right technology, or the training department hasn’t prepared you to do such-and-such, or your boss hasn’t mentored you sufficiently. But real leaders are willing to ask themselves – and others - what they don’t know, and take action to correct it.

What tools do you need to succeed in your career? And what are you doing about it?

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How to Win Great Publicity – Without a PR Firm

How would you like to be featured on CNN, CBS News, the BBC, and VH1? If you’re San Francisco area artist Steven Backman, that’s just a few months’ coverage; over the years, he’s been profiled by scores of top-tier international outlets. But unlike many top professionals, he doesn’t use a high-end PR firm to shill for him. Instead, he’s become his own publicity machine – and his lessons on winning great press can benefit any executive or entrepreneur who seeks a higher profile.

Build a good media list. Backman – who makes elaborate and meticulous sculptures out of toothpicks – began by developing a target list of publications he’d like to be featured in. Next, he identified (through the masthead or looking online) the email addresses for key staffers. “I wouldn’t just email one person,” says Backman. “I’d email the whole staff, the art director, the managing editors.” Journalists might get angry if he did that all the time, but he ensured his messages were timely and interesting. His media list is now up to over 2000, and he says that he each press release he distributes results in at least 2-3 stories.Find a hook. “If I didn’t have a compelling story, people wouldn’t give the time of day,” says Backman. He’s sculpted Prince William and Kate Middleton (in time for their wedding), President Obama, and others. Anniversaries have also been popular media hooks; his toothpick sculpture of the Empire State Building (commemorating its 75th anniversary) was a particular publicity boon. Your pitch, advises Backman, “has to be intriguing to the viewer.” If you’re a hot dog vendor, he says, boasting about “the most delicious hot dog” is a standard claim – but a offering gold-plated hot dog or a hot dog full of caviar will get people’s attention.Your email subject line is critical. When it comes to media outreach, your email subject line makes all the difference, Backman says – otherwise, reporters won’t even read it. The subject line should be intriguing and make them want to open it, and the best email messages are only a few lines long. He includes links to photos of his art (the media love good visuals), but avoids sending .jpg files, which may be trapped by spam filters.Follow up thoroughly. “If I send an email,” says Backman, “a day or two later I’ll do a follow up call: ‘Did you receive my email?’” He’s brief and never pushy, but gives a quick pitch and reminds the journalist to check out his website. Backman credits his success to his “tenacity and being aggressive in a nice way.”Have your soundbites ready. When Backman prepares for an appearance, he always mentions his next show or where people can see his work in person. And he’s sure to cite his website URL repeatedly, and even asks the network to display it at the bottom of the screen. After one Today Show appearance in which he cited his website twice, Backman says he received a million hits in just a few hours.Keep reaching out. “You always have to engage new people,” says Backman. “You can’t keep contacting the same editors over and over again, or they’ll get tired of your story. I always fill my funnel with new people.” But because journalists network with each other – and some have actually profiled him repeatedly – he is sure to stay in regular touch: “I used to send out a blurb once a month, but people would get annoyed. I now do 3-4 a year maximum, and I get a better response.”

Backman credits his grandfather – an insurance salesman during the Great Depression – with teaching him the sales and marketing techniques he uses today. But for executives and entrepreneurs who would like to win media coverage without hiring an expensive PR firm, Backman himself is teaching the lessons.

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How to Turn Your Customers into Evangelists

They’re exactly the kind of customers you want – engaged, excited, and thrilled to tell others about your company. But can you actually convert customers into evangelists for your brand, or is it all just luck? Alex Goldfayn, author of the new Evangelist Marketing: What Apple, Amazon, and Netflix Understand About Their Customers (That Your Company Probably Doesn’t) is convinced there’s a formula that savvy businesses can follow.

A former technology columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Goldfayn draws on his extensive experience in the consumer electronics industry – but argues that any industry, from lawn care to banking, can successfully cultivate evangelists. In a recent podcast interview, Goldfayn shared his tips for building relationships with “hyper-repeat customers” who will “basically do your marketing for you.”

Focus on mainstream customers. Too many companies, especially in the tech world, try to out-geek each other, competing on the basis on cool new technologies. But early adopters represent only 2-3% of the market, and when you’ve optimized a product for their needs (and marketed it as such), it probably won’t work that well for everyone else. So focus on the regular moms and dads, says Goldfayn, or else “you’re volunteering away the other 97% of your market.”Leverage Your Strengths to Understand Your Customers. Apple has been a unique case, says Goldfayn, because of Steve Jobs’ prescient insights: “He understood on instinct what customers wanted better than anybody else in the world.” But most companies can’t rely on that. Instead, the Amazon model may be more apt, in which they came to understand their customers through volumes of data. “Amazon, with its Kindle, has the benefit of thousands and tens of thousands of customer reviews,” observes Goldfayn. “The cornerstone of the system of creating evangelists is a deep understanding of what your customers think, want, and how they use your product or service.”Do Extensive Qualitative Research. If you’re not Apple or Amazon, Goldfayn says the best way to truly grasp what matters to your customers is in-depth qualitative research. But that doesn’t mean Internet surveys (which he says can be too shallow) or focus groups (where he believes customers are often swayed by others in the room). Instead, you want to conduct 20-30 minute in-depth interviews, either on the phone or in person, to probe how customers think about and interact with your products. “What they will reveal to you in your conversations will literally be almost word-for-word the best possible marketing message you can have,” he says. “It’s automatically compelling. You know it’s going to resonate with your market because it’s coming from your market. The companies that don’t do this are just guessing from a conference room.”

Has your company developed evangelists? What strategies have you used?

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How to Make Better Business Decisions

In 1999, Michael Schrage wrote Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate. More than a decade later, the trends he identified – including the importance of using models, simulations, and prototypes to enhance business performance – have only intensified. “The economics of playing with representations of ideas has been transformed,” Schrage told me in a recent podcast interview. “Today, you can do these things far faster and far better.” So how can you and your company take use “serious play” to improve your strategy, performance, and decision making? Here are three techniques to consider:

Learn from models – not requirements on a sheet of paper. Why do “born digital” companies like Google do a better job embracing iteration and innovation? Says Schrage, “They don’t have the legacy and analytical burden of ‘what kind of requirements and specs should we build to?’” Instead of focusing on requirements, he urges a “lean and mean prototyping culture” where companies are willing to play with an interesting problem and say, “Let’s not study it too much; let’s study it just enough so we can build a useful and usable model and learn from that.” The experience you gain in the process will be much more targeted and relevant than anything you can devise on paper.

Test your assumptions. Schrage has spoken about the problems inherent in “spreadsheet culture” – the easy manipulation of numbers that can come from tweaking a few financial assumptions in Excel. But that doesn’t mean he rejects the validity of modeling. Rather, he says, “When the assumptions of a model become an ideology, you run the risk of being screwed.” Instead, he counsels organizations to evaluate their assumptions rigorously: “If you’re not challenging and testing and beating the stuffing out of your assumptions, I think you’re being dishonest,” he says - and that applies to models used by many banks leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. “Very, very, very few of the banking institutions, up to and including the Fed, really harshly tested their assumptions about the real estate market, about derivatives, etc.,” says Schrage. “They had very forgiving assumptions – and when you have forgiving assumptions, that leads to unforgivable results.”

Face yourself honestly. The newspaper and magazine industry never considered Google or blogs to be their competition, says Schrage. Instead, they’d say, “That’s not a newspaper, that’s an aggregator. Or, blogs are some guy or girl in their pajamas, bloviating and posting on the web.” The view, he says, was “We’re not like that at all, so we’re not going to build them into our models or incorporate them into our simulations. We don’t consider that variable important.” And in the space of that blindspot, an industry’s dominance can be forever lost. Instead, Schrage advises, we should view models and simulations as mirrors that reflect back our true nature. “These are not just issues of cognition and intellect,” he says. “These are issues of character and courage – a willingness to look at possible truth. How introspective are we prepared to be? The technologies for introspection for individuals and organizations have been transformed - but just because the technology has been transformed doesn’t mean we’re going to look in those mirrors.”

Is your company using simulation or modeling to make better decisions? What strategies do you use to uncover and hedge against blindspots?

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The Secret to Raising Entrepreneurial Kids

Mary Mazzio – filmmaker-in-residence at entrepreneurial hotbed Babson College – has made a name for herself chronicling the success stories of business innovators. In today’s society, she says, “You have an obligation to be entrepreneurial. You have to ask how to create value for customers, how to run a better and more responsible business. You can’t just be a cog in the machine anymore.” In Lemonade Stories, she interviewed entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Arthur Blank (of Home Depot fame) alongside their moms. In Ten9Eight, Mazzio profiled a group of inner-city youth entering a business plan competition. And in her latest film, The Apple Pushers, she chronicles the story of five immigrant micro-entrepreneurs addressing America’s obesity crisis by selling fruits and vegetables in pushcarts across underserved parts of New York City.

The concept of the film – underwritten by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, which also funded efforts to expand the number of “green carts” – appealed to Mazzio because, she says, “I thought it was really creative to use the concept of free enterprise to address the problem. This kind of philanthropy is bold and messy – not all the entrepreneurs are going to make it. But the ones that do are going to prosper and grow, and there will be an ongoing source of fresh fruits and vegetables in new areas.”

So what has Mazzio learned from interviewing global entrepreneurs? Her surprising answer is that entrepreneurship can be taught – and her films have inspired her to raise her own children differently. Here are four lessons from the world’s top business leaders that Mazzio has incorporated into her family’s life.

Shyness is No Excuse. “My son was shy when he was younger,” recalls Mazzio, and she would make excuses for him. But after interviewing the mother of Richard Branson, she learned that Branson had also been extremely shy in his youth. Says Mazzio, “Eve would have none of it and would say to Richard, ‘You are going to stick your hand out and shake. Stop thinking of yourself and how you feel, and start thinking of the other person.’” So Mazzio required her then-eight-year-old son to greet adults with a handshake, a look in the eye, and a thoughtful question – “and he learned very quickly there was a huge upside to engaging adults.”

Make Room for Inspiration. Where do entrepreneurs get their best ideas? According to Mazzio, it may result from having the space to think creatively. “Creativity has been drummed out of the school curriculum,” she says. “Between playdates and organized sports, adults micromanage every inch of a kid’s life today. When a kid comes to you and says ‘I’m bored,’ that’s not the time to jump in the car and drive to Toys R Us – they have to think of ways to entertain themselves.” In the process, kids will learn to solve their own problems and take initiative – traits every entrepreneur needs.

Earning Money Means Independence. Mazzio is a fan of early, real world entrepreneurship, whether it’s the proverbial lemonade stand or a teenage tech venture. But it’s not because of the money itself. Rather, the process of earning it gives kids “a sense of freedom and independence,” says Mazzio. That empowerment is especially valuable for at-risk youth such as those she profiled in Ten9Eight, who may not see the value in school – until running a business convinces them that math is applicable to daily life, and good writing skills are necessary to create winning business plans that investors will fund.

Failure is Underrated. The value of entrepreneurship isn’t just in creating successful businesses, says Mazzio. Entrepreneurship is a way of life and a way of thinking – and that inevitably means you’ll sometimes fall short. “People talk about failure in such a derogatory context,” she says, “but you can only learn from failure. The greatest entrepreneurs are the people who can get up and pull themselves back after failure. You learn a little with each failure that expands your character, informs your ideas, and makes you think creatively about how to achieve what doesn’t seem achievable.”

The Apple Pushers will be screening in New York, Atlanta, and other cities. Learn more about the film and its screening schedule.

What have you learned from watching - or being - an entrepreneur? What are your strategies for raising entrepreneurial kids?

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The Surprising Secret to Innovation

Anyone who’s had a blazing insight in the shower or leaped ahead at work after a languorous vacation recognizes that sometimes, the path to creative insight isn’t a direct line. On the surface, it might even look random or wasteful - but that process is often necessary for real innovation. That’s the view of Michael Schrage of MIT’s Center for Digital Business and the author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate. With a nod to technology theorist George Gilder, Schrage told me in a podcast interview, “In the early days of a technology, technology is expensive - so you had to write the most elegant, dense, and precise software...The key point is that you can’t afford waste when things are expensive. But what happens when memory is cheap?”

The cost of memory and bandwidth has declined steeply, meaning “you don’t have to be as efficient,” says Schrage. “You can take shortcuts, design things that are a little inefficient. You can afford to waste the resources of a technology that’s now cheap…and the virtual freedom of these technologies means that you can play with all manner of ideas.” That might include building tangible models (3-D printing is now available at rapidly decreasing price points) or writing code for new software and new apps (globalization means someone on Elance will do it for latte money). It might mean creating a service that allows people to upload videos and store them for free, just because you can, and perhaps one day you’ll make money on it. (That would be the theory behind YouTube.)

This sense of play – and the possibilities it raises – extends to human relationships, as well, says Schrage. Architects have long tried to design offices that enhance creative potential and opportunities for intermingling. But now the possibilities are limitless, thanks to online vehicles from Facebook to Yammer. The real question, he says, is “Do you want to collaborate? Do you see yourself as someone who wants to exchange value in a transactional way – ‘I’ll give you this if you’ll give me that’ - or is your view ‘No, let’s build new value together’?”

Finding ways to truly collaborate takes time. You have to build trusting relationships, identify real needs in the marketplace, and determine how you can best meet them – together. The process may not be linear. But “if you’re the kind of child or adult that recognizes…some of the most valuable lessons, the most valuable insights, the greatest pleasure you got was when you played around, then you’ll get it immediately.” Says Schrage, “In the economics of play, of messing around - exploration in these digital and virtual environments favor us. We don’t have to conserve everything; we can play with a multiplicity of options.”

How do you harness your creativity? Do you feel waste can be productive? What are your techniques to enhance collaboration?

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Is Your Product Name Turning People Off?

Every company wants customers talking about their products. But before they can sing your praises on social media or evangelize to their friends, they need to remember your product’s name. It seems obvious, but many companies – especially in the technology sector – overlook this easy way to connect with their audience. That’s the thesis of Alex Goldfayn, former Chicago Tribune technology columnist and author of Evangelist Marketing: What Apple, Amazon and Netflix Understand About Their Customers (That Your Company Probably Doesn’t).

In a recent podcast interview, Goldfayn noted how “the tech industry is literally preventing consumers from talking to each other about their products because they name them so horribly. If it wasn’t costing them billions as a result of the error, it would be funny – but it ends up being a really expensive problem.”

Goldfayn cites the example of his own Samsung flat panel television, which has a model number so long and complex, even he – a tech aficionado – couldn’t possibly remember it. Companies frequently choose names that are “way too long and too complicated, which makes them impossible to remember. It doesn’t allow consumers to reference your product, and doesn’t allow the media to reference it.”

The chief problem, he says, is that companies will often name products based on their own internal needs – distinguishing between model years or other small subtleties. No problem, says Goldfayn – but keep those designations internal, because they simply don’t matter to customers. Instead, he advises, the best product names are “short, quick, memorable and sticky.” No one can forget the Mac, the iPod, the Walkman, or the TiVo. So if you’re naming a new product, aim for the iconic – but at a minimum, stay away from alphanumeric insanity.

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How to Stay Creative at Any Age

It’s easy to watch a hotshot young executive – or poet, painter, or filmmaker – and wonder if creativity is the province of the young. (Silicon Valley certainly loves to bet on the 20-something Zuckerbergs of the world.) But Jonah Lehrer, author of the new Imagine: How Creativity Works, doesn’t buy it: “There’s nothing inevitable about a decline of creativity over time,” he said in a recent interview. Instead, any executive can take steps to ensure their ideas stay fresh, vital, and relevant.

Lehrer cites the work of Dean Simonton of the University of California-Davis, who studied peak creativity in a variety of fields and determined that in some professions (such as poetry or physics), the greatest innovation comes early – before age 30. But in other disciplines, such as history, the peak generally comes a full 10-15 years later. Says Lehrer, “It’s because you have to spend a different number of years assimilating information. As a physicist, there are parsimonious rules you can learn pretty quickly, and once you learn those rules, you’re at your peak. But for a historian, there are lots of disconnected facts you have to absorb before you can come up with something new.” Whether the magic age is 30 or 45, however, because most fields showed a decline in creativity over time, some initially concluded that the aging brain inevitably lost its abilities over time.

But, says Lehrer, that’s dead wrong: “What Simonton discovered in recent years is it’s a process of acculturation, and people becoming invested in the status quo. If you’re a painter you fall into a style, you develop your clichés – your shtick. If you’re a scientist, you know how to apply for certain grants from the NIH, and if you’re an entrepreneur, you know how certain ideas work and you stick with them.” So a loss of creativity is actually a symptom of buying into the system and refusing to try new things.

Instead, “If you have to pick one secret to staying creative throughout your entire life," says Lehrer, "it’s to seek out new problems, and when you feel comfortable and like you know how to do something, do something else.” That approach certainly entails risk – if you’re a serial entrepreneur, it’s a lot easier to get VC funding for a new company in the same vein as your previous successes, and if you’re an artist, it’s a lot easier to convince collectors to buy a piece that features your “signature style.” But taking chances is an essential part of staying vital professionally.

So ask yourself:

Am I taking on new challenges in my business?What habits or clichés do I need to guard against?What is one new approach I can try out immediately?What new skills should I start learning?

What are your strategies for staying innovative? How do you avoid making the safe choice?

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How Raising Prices Can Increase Your Sales

It’s every business executive’s worst nightmare: you raise your prices, only to alienate your customers and decimate your bottom line. But what if the reverse were true?

Social psychologist Robert Cialdini suggests that in some cases, businesses can actually increase their sales by raising prices. The reason behind this surprising phenomenon, he revealed in a recent podcast interview, is that in “markets in which people are not completely sure of how to assess quality, they use price as a stand-in for quality.” While most customers wouldn’t pay $20 for paper towels because it’s easy to compare them to other products on the store shelves, it’s much harder to evaluate certain categories of products or services.

Art is notoriously challenging – what makes a Damien Hirst sell for millions while a similar piece by someone else might languish? Consulting or other professional services are also hard to compare, because practitioners may have different approaches or skill levels, so you’re not comparing apples to apples. Thus, says Cialdini, “especially when they’re not very confident about being able to discern quality in their own right, people who are unfamiliar with a market will be especially led by price increases to go in that direction [and purchase more expensive offerings].”

Pricing is such an important signifier, says Cialdini, that “organizations will sometimes raise their prices and as a consequence, will be seen as the quality leader in their market,” regardless of whether they’ve upgraded their offerings.

Cialdini’s findings aren’t a clarion call for everyone to charge more, however. Pricing mistakes – such as charging high fees when it’s obvious your company doesn’t have the skills or reputation to demand them – are a quick way to lose business. But if you’ve been considering a transition into the luxury market or positioning your company as a top-end provider, higher prices might help you cement that reputation.

How has your company handled its pricing strategy? Have you raised fees? If so, what was the response?

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Is Your City Holding Back Your Career?

Years ago, there were glorious predictions about the “end of geography.” Email and video chats would render cities obsolete, and we’d all be telecommuting from tropical islands (or at least our comfortable suburban homes). That hasn’t happened, of course – and Jonah Lehrer, author of the new Imagine: How Creativity Works, argued in a recent interview that cities are more important than ever. “You still need to meet in person,” he says. “Something intangible happens when people come together in person and share the same zip code. I think we’ve learned the limits of electronic tools.”

Citing the work of theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, Lehrer notes that “as cities get bigger, everyone in that city gets more productive. They invent more patents, they invent more trademarks. No one knows exactly how to explain this, except people are like particles – if you bump into enough other particles, you get some sparks. This friction is a function of density – crowded sidewalks and random bumps -  and that’s where the good ideas come from.”

But that doesn’t mean everyone needs to move to New York or Beijing. Living in the midst of crowds can create new ideas, but even some suburban locations (notably Silicon Valley) can be innovation hubs. The secret, says Lehrer, is “horizontal interaction.” If knowledge remains siloed within companies or industries, it doesn’t matter how dense or vibrant your community is. You need a culture of trading ideas and war stories, and encouraging broad-based connections (programmers who are friends with salespeople and designers and investors and scientists, not just other programmers). Silicon Valley triumphed, says Lehrer, because its culture fostered interactions, from the informal (frequent drinks after work with people from various companies) to the formal (because of employees’ short tenure at startups – an average of only 2 ½ years – they frequently made new workplace connections).

So ask yourself the following questions:

Does my city allow for random and interesting interactions (connecting at coffee shops or running into people on the sidewalk)?Does my city have a cluster of people working in my industry?Does my city have a culture of networking and information sharing?

If not, it might be time to move – your future success could depend on it.

How has your city shaped your professional prospects? What advice would you give others starting out?

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