I do a lot of writing at work - email, memos, general communication.
The other day my boss was reviewing something I'd written before we published it.
He was stopped dead in his tracks over the phrase "to be honest".
"Aren't we always honest?" he asked.
I had used it as a throwaway phrase without thinking much about it. I was sharing the fact that a change in company policy benefited both our employees and (to be honest) our company.
Perhaps I should have said "to be clear" or perhaps I should have discarded the phrase entirely.
It may surprise you to realize that the biggest part of any ERP project budget (in many cases 50% or more, of the total) is devoted to knowledge management - the extraction and migration of information between your implementation team, your consultants and your business community.
In the Planning phase, your team helps the consultants understand the business opportunities and challenges, the current processes, the desired future state and the (potentially new) organizational design.
Next comes the Design phase, where the process overviews are developed to make sure that the new processes meet critical business requirements. The users provide feedback to the consultants and your team to solidify the new design.
The consultants then Build (configure) the system and perform knowledge transfer (showing your team what they're doing and why).
During Testing, your team then uncovers data, security, work flow, reporting and transaction processing bugs within the configuration and communicates these issues to the consultants.
Once the system is stable and reliable, your team devotes several weeks to system documentation, the development of training materials and the delivery of training in preparation for Implementation.
Throughout the effort, Project and business leaders are communicating the need for the new system, the expected benefits and how the new system will affect processes, tasks and the impact on the organization - all the Communication and Change Management tasks.
In some projects I've been involved in, the cost of all these knowledge management and transfer tasks is equivalent of funding four years' college tuition for 300 students! That is a LOT of money.
I spent some time this past weekend, with Google Sites, the new FREE service from Google that enables Team sharing and collaboration. I've long been a huge supporter of tools that enable teams to collaborate and so I had to give Sites a try.
Now I'm not highly technical. I don't code with HTML. And I had no trouble creating a sample company intranet site and also a Customer Site for a service business.
I was easily able to embed and use all the other Google tools (Docs, Calendars, Email, Picassaslideshow, Presentations, iGoogle gadgets) as well as the Sites tools (Filing Cabinet, Announcements, Dashboard and Lists.)
Here's a screenshot of the sample customer service site I created.
Now I've only spent a couple of days with the application but I can see that it will begin to level the playing field for small to mid-sized businesses who simply don't have access to the I.T. resources that their larger competitors do.
With Sites, companies with 10-300 employees could really support improved communication and collaboration.
And they could also use the tool to get closer to their customers.
Sites offer you the opportunity to create a variety of sites under a single account. So I created a sample company intranet and then created a sample customer service site, where my fictitious company could track and communicate issues resolution, share documents, push announcements and even IM with customer contacts.
All in all, my time was well spent.
If you're involved in a small business, or work within a team setting, you'd be doing yourself a favor if you checked this out.
I've been spending a lot of time recently, reading about how to create and deliver a more effective presentation. One great resource is Garr Reynolds' blog, Presentation Zen. I have yet to read his book, by the same name, but it's on my wish list.
Garr's mission in life is to eradicate those "Death by PowerPoint" presentations that we've all attended (or given).
I'm now starting to think that my presentations would be more effective if I flashed back to elementary school, where each of us had to conduct a "Show'n'Tell" class. We brought in something from home (our only visual aid) and spoke about it for five minutes. The success of each presentation rested solely with me and my classmates, not the "thing" we brought in for the presentation.
Later in life, somehow the roles got switched and we began relying more on the visual aids than our own verbal communication skills.
For many of us, PowerPoint became a public teleprompter.
And that's when presentations became "deadly".
It seems to me that one way of determining whether PowerPoint slides are "overwhelming" the verbal message is by showing the slideshow to a complete stranger. If they can glean the message from the slideshow, chances are your message is relying more on the slides than your verbal presentation.
If you take a look at slideshows of renowned presenters, without benefit of the actual live presentation, chances are you'd have a hard time determining what the message was. And that's because the slides are used to punctuate a point, not make a point.
Words are scarce. Illustrations are simple. Graphics/photos are eye catching, sometimes stark and sometimes unexpected. Great presenters' slides don't tell the story. They serve to illustrate it.
Without the commentary, without the "story", this is simply a collection of eclectic slides. If however, you were able to see Seth's presentation, I'm betting you would come away excited by his vision for marketing in a Web2.0 world.
Here is a short video clip of Lawrence Lessig talking about "Video is the new Democracy". Notice his presentation slides as you listen to the short speech. Very few words per slide, written in an old typewriter font (his trademark). The audience focus is on him, his words, his message, not his slides. In fact, a copy of the slideshow wouldn't be particularly helpful to anyone who had not attended the presentation.
Watch.
So the next time you need to present, think about PowerPoint slides like the garnish on a great meal. The "meal" is you and your speech.
[Via Guy Kawasaki's blog]. Thanks to Bert Decker (Executive Coach) who prepares an annual list of the 10 Best & Worst Communicators, I came across this compelling video.
Decker's 10 Best Communicators List for 2007 includes a former cellist, now musical conductor, Ben Zander. The short video below demonstrates his amazing communication skills. His talk contains some gems on the subject of Leadership.
This short (8 minute) video demonstrates why he deserves to be on the list.
In an odd coincidence, yesterday I blogged about The Even Keel - a tribute to Tony Dungy's leadership style. Well, guess who also made the 2007 Best 10 Communicators List.
Maybe, just maybe, effective communicating has something to do with effective leadership.
This video, from O'Reilly Radar demonstrates the impact of how a typical home's energy consumption impacts greenhouse gas emissions. It is a great example of "sticky" communications.
The Heath Brothers (Dan and Chip) would be proud.
Dan and Chip Heath wrote the bestseller Made to Stick, which is a guide to understanding the essential elements of how to effectively communicate an idea. The video demonstrates all six principles of "sticky" communications.
(Sorry, if you want to know what the principles are, you should really buy the book!)
Maybe I'm just getting old. But it seems to me that life is happening at an ever increasing speed. This velocity is preventing us from solving the world's really big problems. The media provides us with 3-5 minute shouting matches, where participants recite each side's talking points, (usually talking over one another), then it's on to the next topic.
Our political leaders talk in sound bites, carefully orchestrated to coincide with the "news cycle". We're constantly blurring the lines between news and entertainment.
We're bombarded with "spin".
No real debate. No in depth analysis of the situation and what we need to do about it. Just because we've spent time "on the topic" doesn't actually advance a solution.
A former boss of mine had a great concept. She talked about "soak time" - the time it took an organization to understand a mission or vision and to begin acting on it. She understood that just because you tell someone a plan doesn't mean they get it right away.
They need time to understand, to question, to internalize the message. Time to take the message to heart, before they can effectively commit to it.
Today 24 hr/day sound bites wash over us like a hard rain on parched dry soil. Rivers of information (such that it is), don't get a chance to "soak in".
I think we're all looking for a slow steady rain of ideas and civil discussion, to enable the challenges to soak in. Until we allow ourselves a little "soak time", we're not going to engage enough people to make substantial headway.
I am continually disappointed how slowly the Corporate world catches onto cultural phenomena. Take YouTube for example. Hundreds of thousands of video clips, (mostly amateur) uploaded daily for all to peruse. This massively popular trend has been mostly ignored by business (unless your business is hosting web videos).
Getting your message across in interesting and effective ways has never been easier, but if you scan your company's Intranet, what do you see?
If your company is very progressive, perhaps your CEO has a blog. Most likely not. Maybe your Corporate Communications department has produced some video, but I bet they distribute it on CDs. Company news, by and large, is presented in text form only - possibly with cute graphics (if produced by HR).
If you think about it, most of us feel that the communication is "complete" as soon as we hit the "publish" button.
There are several flaws in this logic.
First, how do you know anyone has read your text? And secondly, how do you know they understood your message? We're all so busy, that publishing the message becomes the task, not communicating the message.
When one considers that most of America spends 4.5 hours per day watching TV and that on average Americans will purchase ONE book per year, it seems to me that publishing yet another long "how to" manual or boring corporate policy in written form (only), just won't cut it anymore.
IVT (Interactive Video Technologies) offers products to address several of these issues. They offer a simple to use video creation/editing tool that allows you to produce videos, in conjunction with PowerPoint presentations. Their software can track who has seen the video, how long they watched it and the video can be combined with screen captures. Add this to a blog, FAQ, surveys or tests to continue the dialog or to test whether your message was understood.
Think of how effective your message could be if it were to "come alive" in video format and be surrounded by all that collateral material?
All it takes is a little imagination, a web camera and a cheap monthly subscription and you're in business.
So give some thought to effectively communicating, not just publishing.
I'm a transplanted Canadian, who's been (legally) living and working in the U.S. since 1995. Most of my work experience has been within Information Technology, but my career has included brief stops in Operations, Warehousing and Marketing.
My favorite job was probably as Director of Marketng for a B2B (direct marketing) company, located in Toronto.
My most satisfying job was as CIO of a midwest manufacturing company, where my team standardized and regionalized international I.T. operations, then rolled out SAP worldwide.
Best lesson learned? It's not the technology, stupid. It's how well you use it.
