Strategic Discipline Blog

Steven Johnson is the author of Emergence, The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. Most great ideas he noted arrive in the form of hunches, unfortunately in most organizations the freedom to follow these hunches is not readily granted. What he offered was a series of examples to prove the value of what is called swarm intelligence. Order can come from the bottom of your organization, and there is wisdom in crowds. What the Internet has provided is an opportunity to see the emergence of this and the value it provides. 

Wikipedia and Mozilla Fire Fox are two examples of the collective intelligence that has made these two very successful. Google’s success has come through recognizing this bottom up thinking and they have organized their search rankings by counting every link on the web as a vote and thus allowing everyone to vote to attain page rankings. It must be working since Google continues to gain in popularity as the number one search engine. 

In meaning cases the bottom up pattern works better than top down, however he offered several case studies where without leadership, this eventually leads to a downfall in an organization. 

Lego is an example where the business involved their customers to develop new products and ideas. That is perhaps the most important practical piece of information I received out of this presentation. By involving your customers and your staff you can stimulate innovations. Yet customers and staff have to feel they are contributing and that these contributions are making a difference. IF they don’t the likelihood of their continuing to contribute diminishes. The challenge with this practice is getting involvement since the examples of Wikipedia and Mozilla show that in a group contribution 1% do most of the work, 10% participate, edit and offer contributions, yet fully 89% don’t do anything. In order to gain more participation Steve suggested rewarding schemes, rating comments and perhaps simply put a competitive environment in place where people compete for higher scores. Even in situations where there is nothing but a scoring system that is largely meaningless, people contribute more to raise their score. 

Sites like Amazon and E-Bay have gotten great contributions for ratings and comments from their customers which has greatly enhanced their offerings and provided additional value to new and existing customers. If you’ve been to Amazon you’ve probably seen the comments from readers about a book and their rating system. Have you found it helpful? I have, and often times I will read the most negative rating just to make sure what they are saying warns me of what I should be concerned about before making my purchase.

 

Which do you feel is more important, for you to be liked or for you to like the person you are trying to sell? You may disagree with this next statement, but if you think about it I believe you will discover it is true. Praise is the only information accepted and valued as much as when it is true as when it is false. What’s the point of this? The point is that it’s not important for the other person to like you. What’s important is for you to like them. Whether I like you or not will not determine whether I make a purchase, but rather if you like me I will be more inclined to purchase.

If you’ve stayed over night at a hotel recently most likely you’ve seen the signs that ask you to reuse towels. If you wonder how effective it is to provide proof that others are following what you are requesting you’ll find Dr. Cialdini’s recent work at hotels in the Phoenix area interesting.  

You run an ad for your business anticipating generating a vast number of leads. The results are disappointing. You review your ad and feel it’s got everything your customer is looking for, but for some reason it’s not working. 

That’s exactly what BOSE discovered when they introduced a new wave sound system. So they approached Dr. Robert Cialdini to review their ad and give them advice. He agreed that the ad contained everything that a customer would want to know, but he suggested one change, the headline. Instead of announcing new, he suggested, “Hear what you’ve been missing.” The result? A 45% increase in leads generated.
Curious why that works? I am. He indicated it drew on Principle #2 of his persuasion principles, scarcity, or "if I can’t have it I want it. "

How do you establish credibility in a short period of time? To be seen as an expert you must show knowledge and be trustworthy. To build these takes time however. For Principle #3 Robert Cialdini suggests we learn from the experts – mass advertisers. They have 15 to 60 seconds to gain credibility when advertising, so how do they do it?

You’ve just had a delicious meal at a fine restaurant, your waiter or waitress approaches to present you with the bill. What can he or she do to significantly increase the tip you will give them?

First welcome to our first blog! I plan to update this at least once a week if not more with insights on business development, particularly as they relate to Michael Gerber’s E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. I would appreciate your insights from a business perspective as well as if you have worked with us or with E-Myth coaching now or in the past.

My first post is on an upcoming article you’ll have the opportunity to download on our site for free in the next week or so. I’m putting the finishing touches on a “White Paper” I’ve written entitled “Top Grading, Was Michael Gerber Wrong?”  The article discusses the concept that you can and should hire people at the lowest common denonimator for your business, or that the theory called Top Grading, relying on the best people to run your business is best. Top Grading suggests that you need to have the very highest and best quality of people to run your business. Which is right, which is wrong, or is there a place somewhere in the middle, and indeed did Michael Gerber even suggest that you should have people at the lowest level operating your business. I’ll have some insights into that in my White Paper and hope you will offer your opinions on this subject when its posted. 

I plan to have more on this as I get more used to this blogging approach and hope you will join me here frequently for insights into operating your business more effectively using the principles that E-Myth business development coaching and other methods provide for producing a business that works without you and gives you more life. 

Thanks for reading.