Bob Stains, vice president of the Public Conversations Project, was interviewed on Wisconsin Public Radio this week about this group’s work promoting understanding among people who vehemently disagree over political and other issues.
It’s tough work, even when you feel commitment to try. But the rewards are surprising and lasting.
It was so much fun to watch Betty White show off her craft this week on Saturday Night Live. The show has been so lackluster lately, but this 88 1/2-year old comedienne livened it up.
While searching for pictures to use for a presentation at the New Britain Public Library, my hometown library in Connecticut in June, I came across this:
Beth and I published “The Good Girl’s Guide to Negotiating” in 2001 — and apparently the advice continues to spread across the globe. The foreign covers are always great!
Good Girl's Guide to Negotiating in Polish
Co-authors Emily Bennington and Skip Lineberg, two influential bloggers and speakers in the business world, have written Effective Immediately (Ten Speed Press, 2010), a valuable guide for recent graduates who, as the subtitle says, want to “Fit In, Stand Out, and Move Up at Your First Real Job.” As an instructor to college students majoring in business, I have learned that most of them lean towards taking the fitting in approach, when in fact the combination strategy of fitting in and standing out — deftly selecting times to blend in or make compromises, and yet seizing the opportunities to be creative or call attention to yourself — is actually one of the surest roads to success. And by success I mean being able both to contribute to your team and advance and improve yourself on a fairly regular basis.
“Find your inner Gene Kelly” is lyrical advice. The authors examine Gene Kelly’s dancing in attempt to discover what made him seem to “float” above the his peers. They claim his edge was “incremental,” noting that small things, like the consistent polish of his shoes, the angle of his cane, and the crease in his pants made all the difference. That attention to small detail, taken together “seemed to make his dancing effortless.”
The theory of the incremental edge, by the way, echoes one of Malcolm Gladwell’s key arguments in The Tipping Point: that small changes in presentation can often make a big difference when it comes increasing the appeal — and ultimate impact — of an idea or product. You just have to figure out what changes to make depending on your audience.
Among Bennington and Lineberg’s list of sample “Gene Kelly dance steps:”
- Use superb grammar (hooray for that!)
- Complete assignments early
- Give a small gift to your clients (your favorite business book or flowers) on the anniversary of your partnership
- Keep your desk spotless at all times.
If you — like me — consider that last item too tall an order, come up with your own deft moves. It’s a fun exercise and, as they say, incrementally, but also immediately, effective.
Just posted today, a woman in Brazil who is spreading the word about The Good Girl’s Guide to Negotiating in its Portuguese translation. Beth and I wrote it nearly ten years ago, but it’s still relevant — perhaps now more than ever in this tough economy:
http://marielydelrey.com/blog/2010/03/guia-de-negociacao-para-mulheres/
Very cool the way Google can translate the page into English. Try it!
Think about personal needs as a strategic tool if you want to speed up decision making:
Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr, rarely holds meetings anymore. But when she did, she writes in this month’s Inc. magazine, everyone would stand, and they talk only after everyone drank 16 ounces of water. The agenda would be discussed, decisions would be made, “and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.”
That reminded me of a tip Former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder offered when she was interviewed for The Good Girl’s Guide to Negotiating. She confessed to “cutting off bathroom privileges” if she was trying to wrap up a particularly tough negotiating session.
Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion also may come into play. So ignore these needs if you want meetings to end sooner rather than later, or attend to them if you want the discussion to take a more leisurely course.
It’s happened to a banker in Providence, RI, a real estate investment adviser in Boise, ID, and scores of people who work in manufacturing in Midwestern states. If you’ve suffered the embarrassment of being laid off not once, but twice, relax — you are hardly alone. While the latest government statistics tracking people who’ve had two spells of unemployment won’t be out until December, hiring managers are increasingly aware that it is a common occurrence, and not necessarily a black eye.
In fields like marketing and information technology, being laid off may even classify as “normal,” says Lynn Hazan, a Chicago-based executive recruiter. Advertising agencies and marketing departments cut positions when they lose accounts; global companies trim their IT staffs to meet shifting needs. “Everyone knows how much ‘no-fault’ job loss there is, and that [he or she] may be just as vulnerable to it as you have been,” says John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm.
So come to a job interview confident that you can explain your double dose of unemployment. “Be candid and focus on the business reasons,” says Melvin Scales, vice president for global solutions, Right Management, a Philadelphia-based outplacement firm. Assuming your layoffs had nothing to do with performance, make that clear by explaining why your position — not you — became less relevant to your employer. If your manager has indicated a desire to hire you back when the economy improves or has written a glowing recommendation, mention that to bolster your case, Hazan advises.
You might even claim that suffering through double layoffs makes you a more attractive job candidate. “When people go through downsizing, typically they use the time to sharpen their skills,” either by working as a consultant or getting additional training, says Scales. Make sure that applies to you. In addition, stress your own understanding of the fact that rapid change is high on the list of challenges many companies face nowadays. Says Hazan: “State what you learned from those experiences and how that can be of help to the new employers.” While your job history may be clouded by double layoffs, clear it up by offering your own extra dose of industry insight.
“How to Get Any Job: Life Launch and Relaunch for Everyone Under 30,” by Donald Asher (Ten Speed Press, 2002 & 2009) aims to advise college-aged people on their future careers. He structures workshops for the readers to figure out what they’re all about, throws in some anecdotes to support his workshops, and ties it all together with economic advice.
Asher recommends that we take our time now to figure out what we want, because we have yet to be indoctrinated in the “adult working world.” He says to hold out for an ideal opportunity, instead of taking what you can, and chastises us losers who live in our parent’s basements.
He has some good advice, but he didn’t realize how expensive housing would become (as compared to the book’s first printing in 2002), the growing unemployment rate, and the fact that most of today’s college kids have been in the “adult working world” since they were 14. The economy is changing, and here’s how to confront it:
1. Living as a team is the new recipe for success: Living in your parent’s basement isn’t the travesty it used to be. To save on funds, many grads are opting to live with their parents. You are no longer weird for wanting to save money!
2. Take what you can get: We typically want to start an actual career right out of college. But what do you do when people who have worked in your field for twenty years are suffering massive layoffs? There are also lapses in insurance to think about. You may want to think about having a “day” job with benefits, while you pursue your passion in your off time.
3. Get creative: Perhaps Asher was able to wait around for his career opportunities, but we can’t. If you want a job, sometimes you just have to invent one for yourself.
If you want a career, sometimes you have to invent your own path. Try taking more responsibilities on at your current job. For example, if you’re a future editor working at a minimum wage job, offer to edit the training manual. I know a fellow who works in data entry that just got a raise for using his IT knowledge. Otherwise, you can always contract your skills privately or start your own business
Today, many business leaders tend to believe that the most profitable way to operate is to establish a relationship with their customers. Marketers use terms like “connection strategy” to describe their attempts to satisfy their customers’ needs and develop loyalty.
Writers have it all over them, and have for a long time, at least based on the one focus group I conducted back when I was 16. I didn’t know anything about business strategy when I and my friends wrote fan letters to a number of people 
we admired back in the 70s. We were bored high schoolers, and our plan was to have a fabulous dinner party to liven up our small Connecticut town. We invited Woody Allen, Rudolph Nureyev, probably Bob Dylan and several other unlikely guests. No one showed up, which didn’t surprise us too much. But what was striking — and made the entire enterprise a huge success — was that all (and only) the writers replied.
I don’t think a single one was thinking overtly about “satisfying our needs” or “developing loyalty.” But they certainly did both, several with a simple postcard. John Updike answered with a question: were we surprised he wasn’t coming? Maurice Sendak had a little printed drawing of a dog on his. Paul Zindel, author of The Pigman and The Effect of Man in the Moon Marigolds, wrote back on blue stationery. Robert Penn Warren’s wife declined on his behalf, as did Thorton Wilder’s secretary. Best of all was the response from J.D. Salinger, who sent a handwritten rejection that called us ‘winsome’ girls. It couldn’t have been sweeter. And it sealed our loyalty, requiring not another word, for nearly 40 years.
As an author myself, I know that books are a strange combination: works of art that are sold as products. But I also know you get very far, in any field, if your connection with your customers is viewed solely as “strategy” cooked up in a corner office. It’s got to come from someplace more sincere and unstoppable – like a reflex — that is found deep inside.
