Q #37: What is “cognition clutter” and what is its significance?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Each day, on average, our senses receive about 2,500 different “messages” from various experiential sources. They compete for our attention and few succeed. Moreover, we seem to have a much shorter interest span than our parents did and our children have a much shorter one than ours. So what? There are several significant consequences. Here are two.

1. Information Overload: We receive more information than we can process, much less assimilate and evaluate (e.g. determine relative importance). This creates confusion and frustration as well as anxiety and perhaps even depression. Some if us use our brains to develop filters that function like spam blockers that prevent us from receiving urgently important messages.

2. Marketing Barriers: Those who have something to promote must create or increase demand for it. With more and more people promoting more and more stuff, there is a great deal of “cognition clutter” that fragments and weakens communication. Recently published books such as Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy and Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology suggest that marketing has become very active on the subconscious level and has significant influence, not only purchase decisions but also about whom to vote for, which cause(s) to support, etc. Much (most?) of this is happening without our being aware of it.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #36: What is “The Halo Effect”?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

It is one of nine business delusions that deceive managers, discussed by Phil Rosenweig in his book with that title. Specifically, it is “the tendency to look at a company’s overall performance and make attributions about its culture, leadership, values, and more. In fact, many things we commonly claim drive company performance are simply attributions based on prior performance.” He asks his reader to view this book as a “guide for the reflective manager, a way to separate the nuggets from the nonsense.” Rosenweig focuses on the delusions that “make it difficult to know why one company succeeds and another fails. These errors pervade much that we read about business, whether in leading magazines or scholarly journals or management bestsellers. They cloud our ability to think clearly and critically about the nature of success in business.”

What must be done to understand high performance?

1. Clear away all of the delusions that “permeate so much popular thinking about business.”

2. Quoting Tom Lester of the Financial Times, to admit, “the margin between success and failure is often very narrow, and never quite as distinct or as enduring as it appears at a distance.”

3. “By extension, to recognize that good decisions don’t always lead to favorable outcomes, that favorable outcomes are not always the result of mistakes, and therefore to resist the natural tendency to make attributions based solely on outcomes.”

4. And finally, to acknowledge that luck often plays a role in company success. “Successful companies aren’t ‘just lucky’ – high performance is not purely random – but good fortune does play a role, and sometimes a pivotal one.”

Re the last point, I wholly agree with Rosenberg that if independent variables aren’t measured independently, “we may find ourselves standing hip-deep in Halos.” I also agree with another point he makes in the final chapter: “But when the die is cast, the best managers act as if chance is irrelevant – persistence and tenacity are everywhere.” In an American Airlines television commercial that appeared years ago, as associate wished his CEO “good luck” as he was about to begin an important trip. The CEO snapped back, “Luck is for rabbits!”

If you wish to contact Rosenberg directly: Phil@the-halo-effect.com.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #35: What are the best questions to ask a client when requesting feedback about your performance?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Andrew Sobel is the author of All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Relationships. In it, he offers excellent advice. For example, what are the best questions to ask a client when requesting feedback about your performance.

1. What is your overall assessment of my [my firm’s] performance this far? For example, where has my [our] performance exceeded your expectations/ Where is there a need for improvement?

2. If you could immediately change anything in our relationship, what would it be? Why?

3. What are you hearing about my [our] performance from your people?

4. How can I [we] improve my [my firm’s] working relationships with them?

5. In weeks and months to come, what do you want to have me [my firm] thinking about when working with you and your people? For example, what do you expect to be the most important issues to be addressed?

6. What more could I [we] do to help your company be of even greater value to your customers?

7. How can I [we] make it much easier to work with me [us]?

8. Are there any unmet needs that I [my firm] could perhaps help to fill?

9. Am I [Is my firm] focusing on what is most important to you and your company?

10. Are there any other issues or concerns we need to discuss?

Here is a link to Sobel’s Web site: http://www.andrewsobel.com/

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #34: Why are the works of Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and von Clauswitz still so popular among executives?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

I have no idea how many business executives have actually read The Art of War, The Prince, and/or On War. That said, my guess (only a guess) is that Sun Tzu’s ideas have received far more attention than have those of the other two, because of the attention brought to them and their relevance to the business world by contemporary authors such as Thomas Cleary, Lionel Giles, Samuel B. Griffith, Gerald Michaelson, and Ralph D. Sawyer. More specifically, Sun Tzu’s core concepts about leadership, management, and strategy are more easily applied to situations within an organization today than are Machiavelli’s von Clauswitz’s.

For example, Sun Tzu asserts that every battle is won or lost before it is fought. It is standard practice today for companies such as advertising agencies, when preparing to make a major presentation, that they anticipate and then fully prepare for every possible development. Nothing is left to chance.

The so-called “guerrilla” strategies that Jay Conrad Levinson and others discuss in their books are simply updated versions of the same strategies that Sun Tzu recommends in one section of The Art of War that Griffith translates as “Estimates.” They are consistent with one of Sun Tzu’s core concepts: deception. That is, if you are small, seem large…or vice versa; if you are rested, seem exhausted…or vice versa. The objective to encourage an attack where you are strongest and discourage one where you are weakest. The corollary is to deceive an opponent so that you create a situation where you can attack with maximum force where that opponent is weakest.

SunTzu also strongly recommends that there be no direct engagement with an opponent until being able to control of its timing and location. That was not the situation on October 25, 1854, when Lord Cardigan led a disastrous charge of British cavalry against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava (the “Charge of the Light Brigade”) nor was it the situation on July 2, 1863, the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, when Confederate troops ascended Little Round Top, the smaller of two rocky hills south of town. Throughout history, there are countless examples of companies whose aggressive initiatives were literally at the wrong time and/or in the wrong place.

Much nonsense has been said and written about “David and Goliaths” throughout business history. It is worth noting that the Biblical David refused to engage in hand-to-hand combat. He had mastered the slingshot, prior to their encounter, and knew that he could – and would – slay Goliath with a carefully selected and precisely placed stone.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob