BuiltEnvironment

Changing my mindset

A few years ago, I joined Facebook. I created personal and company pages to connect with family and friends AND to promote my business. But I couldn't make the two pages do what I wanted; there were so many worthless items appearing that other people had written.

For example, one night, a contact in Dallas made four posts just before 11pm about the fact that he was tired and was wondering whether he should go to bed. These four posts showed up on my business page, accompanied by 15+ comments from HIS friends urging him to go to bed if he was that tired.

And I couldn't figure out how to delete individual items, so I ended up deleting people as fast as I was adding them. I finally decided that Facebook had insufficient value for me to put up with the frustration it caused me, so I deleted both pages.

I never did anything with Twitter. I didn't think I had much to say that would interest many other people, and I didn't think I had the time to follow a bunch of other people and/or companies. I didn't see that any value could be packed into 140 characters.

On the other hand, I have been an active LinkedIn user for many years. I keep my profile updated and spend time every week looking at questions and answering those where I have more to say than just "me too!" I congratulate people on promotions, keep up with folks who change jobs, and offer help where I can. And I look at new people who have joined to find those I already know, or with whom I have many connections, to expand my own list of connections.

Opportunities have come my way through LinkedIn, and I have reconnected there with people when emails to them bounced back because they had changed jobs. I have made some solid business connections and friends with whom I regularly interact online and on the phone.

I often ask other marketing professionals about their A/E or related firms' use of Facebook and Twitter. They all said they couldn't tie specific new sales or clients to either outlet. They said they were using those tools "because everyone else is," and we would laugh.

I thought that using a service because everyone else is, even though one couldn't identify real benefits from using the service, was a bit like 25+ years ago, when we all still used Yellow Pages advertising. It told our competitors that we were still in business but didn't often result in new clients or business.

I've changed my mind -- and my mindset!

After all, marketing is about tomorrow -- who we will work with/for tomorrow, what we will work on tomorrow, what we will bill time to tomorrow. Therefore, marketing leaders have to be concerned with what technology we will use tomorrow. We need to get, and stay, ahead of the curve on relevant technologies.

So I'm embarking on a course of self-education about all the technologies I've pooh-pooh'ed and ignored. I owe it to myself, my clients, and anyone in my industry who thinks I have anything of value to say. By the time I'm done, I expect to be using Facebook, Twitter and other tools I discover along my journey.

That's my resolution for 2012 - a few weeks late perhaps, but it doesn't matter when I catch up as long as I DO catch up!

Missed opportunities

Over the last 20 years, I've received a lot of phone calls from A/E industry recruiters. The calls were sometimes about low- to mid-level marketing positions, but most often were about engineering or architectural positions in which I had neither qualifications nor interest. Once that was established, the recruiter almost always asked me I knew of anyone else who might be interested.

My stock answer was something to the effect that I saw no reason why I should do their job while they collected the commission. (I thought that I was being very smart!)

Now, I'm reading a book called "Never Eat Alone," by Keith Ferrazzi. On pp.132 and 133, Ferrazzi says, "Headhunters are professional matchmakers... I return every call from them, helping to tap my network to find people for their jobs. I know they'll help me with access to some of their clients when I need their help. After all, they are in the networking business."

Now, 20 years later and, I hope, 20 years smarter, I know that my standard answer to those recruiters was not smart, but merely "smartass!"

Now, after a long and (mostly) successful career as an A/E/C/environmental industry marketing professional,  I know that successful networking starts with giving, with helping others, and that you can only ask for favors after you have created the relationship -- you have to give before you can get.

So I have to wonder how differently my three job searches over the last 12 years might have turned out if I hadn't been such a smartass... if I had developed solid, respectful relationships with a few successful recruiters... if I had understood 20 years ago that "what's in it for me?" is not always the best attitude with which to build a relationship.

Would I be just where I am now? Would I be working at my dream job at my dream firm? Would my company, The Siben Consult, LLC, have have a staff of five or six people and need to turn away work for lack of bodies to execute projects?

There's no way to know.

But I do wonder.

 

 

 

                                    "Remember the Alamoo!"

                                    (downtown Austin art-cow collection)

Efficient and ineffective

There are a great many people who think that the words "effective" and "efficient" are interchangeable -- that they mean the same thing. But this is not the case.

I have on occasion explained to a person or group that being effective means doing the right thing, while being efficient means doing the thing right (i.e. in the correct manner). Often, the person to whom I offered this explanation will look at me like I've grown another head!

Anyway, I've just started reading "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi (with Tahl Raz). On page 44, Ferrazzi observes that "Too often, we get caught up efficiently doing ineffective things..." Many of us spend hours painstakingly following a complicated process, getting every step right, without ever considering that we might have chosen the wrong process to follow or the wrong outcome to pursue.

Obviously, we should want to make sure we are doing the right thing before worrying about how to do it right.

And here's a somewhat philosophical question to ponder: if you chose the wrong thing to do, does it really matter how well you did it?

Of course, growing a second head might enable me to be both more effective AND more efficient, that that's another post altogether!

It is, however, always nice to have one's thoughts validated by others.

Words of praise

First of all, I hope all my readers had a wonderful and safe Christmas holiday, and that we'll all have an equally great and safe New Year's Eve.

Now, on to today's thought.

When I was a youngster, my mother thought the sun rose on my left shoulder and set on my right. And she frequently praised even my smallest, least important efforts. But praise in one's professional life is generally harder to come by.

I wrote an article for the September issue of CE News ("So you want to be a project manager?"). I received some emails with feedback about the article, and was pleased that some readers had found enough value in my writing to contact me with their comments. I was so tickled by the emails that I forwarded them to the magazine's editor. I thought it ended there.

This afternoon, I finally found some time to catch up on my reading, and picked up the November issue of CE News. At the top of page 10, I discovered two of those emails - the editor had elected to publish them as "Letters." Finding those two letters in the magazine was as big a charge as seeing my article in the first place!

I just wanted to take this opportunity to point out this article to any of my readers who might not usually see CE News, and to brag just a little about the letters of praise.

AND to let you know that I have another article in the December CE News. That article is about strategic marketing.

Happy New Year!

Giving back

In the A/E/C community, we talk a lot about "giving back"--particularly about "giving back" to the communities in which we work or have projects. Most of the time, this "giving back" takes the form of donations of money, goods and/or volunteer hours to local charities. Some firms' programs are formalized, specifying the types of recipients or the types of efforts allowable under the program. Others leave much up to the employee's discretion.

In an article in the September 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review written by Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), he observes that:

"Businesspeople going into philanthropy... typically have the idea that they need to "give back." This implies, of course, that when they worked in the business world, they were "taking away."

I think the idea of "giving back" to the communities where we live, work and do projects is admirable. But if we believe Omidyar's thought about "taking away," are we contributing because we really care or because of a vague sense of guilt for taking a community's money to do the project. Consider this:

• An architectural, engineering, planning, environmental or other firm must set hourly rates to pay staff, which rates will then be used with various multipliers to establish billing rates for invoicing clients;
• The rates don't reflect all the factors that contribute to a professional or technical person's true value--his or her education and the school where it was obtained, their project experience, their ability to communicate with a client, their ability to listen to a client and understand both spoken and unspoken goals, their ability to stand up and present the client's project in a public forum, and many other qualifications.
• The rates reflect some of these criteria, differently combined for each employee, informed by a knowledge of market forces and what the client would consider a rate that is too high.

Given these factors, when an A/E or related firm performs a project, it is already "giving back" simply by doing its best work, without adjusting the amount or quality of that work according to the rate the client is willing to pay. Design of a water system that more efficiently delivers this often scarce resource, a facility that more effectively uses building orientation to provide better natural lighting, electrical and mechanical systems that use energy more efficiently and cut operating costs, are all ways of "giving back" by doing creative, high-quality work on a client's behalf.

When an environmental consultant determins minimum streamflow requirements in order to protect the species living within and along a stream while still providing hydroelectric generation for downstream cities, that is also "giving back" by doing creative, high-quality work on a client's behalf.

These are the same as making an "in-kind" contribution to a worthy charitable cause, like spending the day working the Habitat for Humanity to build a home, or providing sound equipment rent-free for a fundraising concert.

So even if your architectural, engineering, planning, surveying, landscape architectural, construction management or environmental firm doesn't have a codified structure for making donations to the local United Way campaign, and even if you don't believe you ever "took away" anything in the first place, you are still "giving back" to the community.

Perhaps the gap between a professional team's true value and the portion of that value billed to the client should also be considered "giving back."

Some facts simply don't matter very much!

I have subscribed to Harvard Business Review for a year. One benefit is that I get "The Daily Stat," a one- or two-paragraph summary of a study of (purported) relevance to the real world. The email for last Friday (September 23) reported on the study, "How do Students Respond to Labor Market and Education Incentives." The summary revealed:

"An uptick in the jobless rate from 5% to 6% decreases the amount of time high-school students choose to spend on homework by about 19 minutes per week. That's because a higher unemployment rate diminishes expected labor-market returns, thus reducing the value of human-capital investment. For similar reasons, a $1 rise in the minimum wage in a state increases students' homework time by about 21 minutes per week."

So if the unemployment rate rises by 1%, students will spend 3.8 minutes less on homework each day, assuming that homework is a Monday through Friday task. If a state's minimum wage rises by $1, the time spent on homework will rise by 4.2 minutes per day (same M-F assumption).

This may be an interesting "factoid" (little fact) to people who obsess about collecting facts whether they have real utility or not, or to lovers of Trivial Pursuit. But does anyone truly believe that students studying 3.8 minutes less or 4.2 minutes more per day makes any real impact on their grades, on their job potential, the state in which they will find the world or the state in which they will leave it?

Every piece of information is a fact. But not all facts are created equal. Some facts may have absolutely no real importance whatsoever.

It makes me wonder how much money was spent by a government entity, university or local school district to develop this information.

Multi-tasking -- two things at once or just divided attention?

The May 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review includes an interview with David Allen and Tony Schwartz, entitled, "Being More Productive." Toward the end of the interview, Allen (author of "Getting Things Done") says with great confidence, "You can only do one thing at a time."

That made me think about the concept of multi-tasking, and how businesses and managers value the act and the people who say they can do it.

My thought process goes like this: Can you truly write with both hands at the same time, each hand writing something different? Can you actually read two books at the same time, each with only one eye, understanding and retaining both stories or messages? Or are you really just shifting back and forth between two tasks, making a little progress on one and then shifting to the other, making a little progress on the second and shifting back to the first?

To me, this seems both ineffective and inefficient. Let's say you have two tasks to accomplish, each of which should take one hour. If you are going back and forth between the two, then it will take you almost two hours to finish the first task, maybe more than two hours. Further, if you add the time it will take to get into the mindset of each task every time you switch back and forth, and the fact that you might have to reread or rethink part of what you've already accomplished to get back on track, it could take much more than two hours to complete the two one-hour tasks.

It is a good thing to be able to balance a multitude of priorities and directives from a number of managers, but the fact is that we do the highest priority task first. When we reach a point where we must wait for someone else to do something (review a draft, for example) or provide additional data, we can turn to another priority in the interim. All well and good. But working on two different things in one day is not the same as working on two different things at the same time.

For me, the belief that "multi-tasking" means doing two things at once, making them feel simultaneous by carving each into very small consecutive pieces, is simply a delusion that results in being both ineffective and inefficient. I think managers and clients should be less impressed with people who claim they can "multi-task" and more impressed with people who demonstrate that they can focus and produce.

Winning principles . . . losing principals

As a long-term A/E/C/environmental marketer, I have written many proposals. Some win, some don't. Even great proposals are not always selected. But how many of those "not selected" efforts were lost by the project principal?

A client invited me to a debriefing for a proposal and short-list presentation I had managed. We repeated only what was needed to answer the questions in the short-list notice. We spent our time addressing the client's needs (both published and not), the project's technical challenges (with pictures) and our potential solutions (with rough sketches).

The principal hadn't attended any rehearsals. He said, "I've done this so many times; I'm better when I 'wing it'. My time is better used elsewhere."

The intended project manager (PM) and I met with the client, and asked her to explain the major reason we were not selected. Her reply went like this:

You had the highest-scoring proposal of all three short-listed firms. This was your project to lose. Your presentation was on point, with great visuals to help us understand the project's challenges and possible solutions.

But your principal's behavior demonstrated that neither we nor our project was terribly important to him.

The intended PM and I were flabbergasted! She asked why the client thought this.

If we and our project had been important, the principal would have made time for the rehearsals, but it was obvious he didn't. He was being introduced to team members in the hallway. He hadn't met them before because he didn't attend rehearsals.

His introduction of the team member firms showed only cursory knowledge of what each firm did and how they would participate. That told us he wasn't very interested in the team.

We watched his face as team members spoke. He often looked surprised -- what he was hearing was totally new to him. That confirmed our suspicion that he had not been in the rehearsals.

It's basically an ego thing. Thinking there are better uses of his time than presenting to us means that he doesn't think we are an important client of your firm. So we selected a firm that values us more highly.

Bottom line? The next time you put an RFQ or RFP through your "Go/No Go" process, ask your principal if he will attend rehearsals. If not, maybe someone else can fill the principal role and demonstrate this client's importance to your firm's success, or maybe the solicitation should really be a "No Go."

A metric for "wasted money"

In the March 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review, I found a great quote attributed to John Wanamaker, the founder of a chain of department stores popular from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. Wanamaker said:

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the touble is, I don't know which half."

A/E/C and related firms spend a lot of money on advertising and promotion -- not only the actual cost of print and digital ad placement, but also the salaries of the graphics people who design their business card and display ads, and the marketing staff and other people who write and update their web site text, blogs, tweets, Facebook pages, etc.

But there don't seem to be any true, accurate metrics to measure the impact or benefit of these contacts or the spending they entail. For example, the number of people who follow your firm on Twitter does not equate directly to the number of existing or new clients; the number of people who click through from an online ad to your web site is an equally non-informative measure of how many viewers actually open projects with your firm.

Perhaps what we really need is a new kind of client survey -- one that you can implement shortly after a new client signs their first contract -- one where you ask questions to find out how the client heard about your firm in the first place, why they decided to contact you for information, and how they finally decided to select you to design and/or build their project.

When all is said and done, such a survey might be as instructive and valuable to you as the in-person surveys you do at project mid-point (and then again at project completion). These surveys might tell you a great deal more about the client's expectations than you currently understand. And knowing the client's expectations greatly improves your chances of adjusting those expectations to the realities of designing and constructing their project.

Analysis paralysis

I just read an interesting article called "Don't Get Blinded By the Numbers," in the March 2011 issue (I know, I know, I've fallen behind in my reading!) of Harvard Business Review. The author, Roger Martin, cites an information/decision process used by P&G's CEO, A.G. Lafley, where the numbers were somewhat misleading but the qualitative information was more informative. Martin quotes CEO Lafley as concluding:

"The analysis never tells you the answer. The best it can do is to inform your judgment."

In my 30+ years as a professional A/E marketer, I have seen a great many people suffering from analysis paralysis when there was too much information, when there were too many alternatives from which to choose, or when no answer was clearly "the right one." So they analyze and re-analyze to such depths that intelligent comparisons can no longer be made.

And they are OK with the idea of being stuck, looking at the same data over and over again until there is a clear answer!

They dither until the situation dictates a choice, or until someone else makes the choice for them. In either case, they can point to someone (or something) else as making the decision, and they can't be "punished" for making the wrong choice.

My gut conclusion is that analysis paralysis is the refuge of those who simply don't trust their own judgment, and are more afraid of the imagined consequences should they make the wrong choice, than they are of the consequences of doing nothing (which is also, after all, a choice!).