Advocacy: Championing Ideas and Influencing Others

Advocacy This page intentionally left blank Advocacy Championing Ideas Ω Inﬂuencing Others JOHN A. DALY New Haven and London Copyright ∫ 2011 by John A. Daly. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. ofﬁce) or [email protected] (U.K. ofﬁce). Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Janson and Gotham types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Daly, John A. ( John Augustine), 1952– Advocacy : championing ideas and inﬂuencing others / John A. Daly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-300-16775-7 (alk. paper) 1. Branding (Marketing). 2. Social interaction. 3. Communication in marketing. I. Title. hm1166.d35 2011 302.2—dc22 2011008294 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents 1 2 Communicate Your Idea with Impact, 22 3 4 The Politics of Ideas, 1 Frame Your Message, 44 Build Your Reputation, Create a Brand, 65 5 6 Form Alliances, 89 Your Idea Is Only as Good as Its Story, 119 7 Who’s Making the Decision? 139 8 9 10 Network! 167 Timing Is Everything, 188 Create Persuasive Messages, 219 11 Make the Idea Matter, 241 vi CONTENTS 12 Make a Memorable Case, 264 13 Demonstrate Conﬁdence, 287 14 Steer Meetings Your Way, 303 Notes, 329 Index, 369 Advocacy This page intentionally left blank 1 The Politics of Ideas It is harder to get a good idea accepted than to get a good idea. stephen friedman If we had an Innovators’ Hall of Fame, it would include Tim Berners-Lee; William Campbell, Mohammed Aziz, and Roy Vagelos; Patsy Mink and Edith Green; David Warren; Clair Patterson; Joan Ganz Cooney; and Jim Delligatti. Their names may be unknown to you, but each is responsible for at least one extraordinary innovation that affects us every day. They have something else in common, too. Each faced strong resistance from others —bosses, colleagues, and other decision makers—who often blithely dismissed their brainstorm, publicly challenged its value, or, in some cases, tried to sabotage it. Each of these intrepid innovators came to learn what so many other creative researchers, scientists, engineers, and business leaders recognize: It is not enough to come up with a brilliant idea. You also need to galvanize support through effective advocacy. Not only did Tim Berners-Lee come up with what we know today as the World Wide Web, but he also had to convince his employer, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), to support his work on the Web. After pushing indefatigably for his notion, he ﬁnally won management’s support. But then he faced a second advocacy challenge: to persuade CERN to make his brainchild freely available to the public. ‘‘It took 1 2 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 18 months... to persuade CERN directors not to charge royalties for use of the Web,’’ Berners-Lee says. ‘‘Had we failed, the Web would not be here today.’’∞ William Campbell was a drug researcher who discovered a cure for river fever, a malady that every year blinded millions of people living in the tropics. Campbell, along with his colleague Mohammed Aziz, persuaded Roy Vagelos, then head of research and development at Merck, to develop the drug, now called Mectizan. Then Campbell, Aziz, and Vagelos faced a daunting advocacy challenge: convincing Merck executives to spend enormous amounts on a pill that wouldn’t make the company a penny, because the people who needed the drug were some of the poorest in the world. They succeeded, and Merck has since donated more than 2.5 billion tablets (worth close to $4 billion). Today more than 25 million people receive the drug annually—and have their sight—because of Campbell, Aziz, and Vagelos’s advocacy. In fact, the World Health Organization recently announced that river blindness may soon be eliminated in Africa. If you have a daughter who plays soccer or volleyball today, you should thank Patsy Mink and Edith Green. In the late 1960s, Mink and Green were two of the few female members of the U.S. Congress. Struck by the absurd limits placed on women’s involvement in college activities, they shepherded through Congress, despite blatant sexist opposition, an innovative piece of legislation called Title IX, which today guarantees girls and women opportunities in education and athletics. In 1972, when the law was passed, girls accounted for only 7 percent of all athletes in high school; by 2008 they accounted for almost half.≤ Every time you board an airplane, you might think kindly of David Warren. Working at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory in Melbourne in the 1950s, he dreamed up what we now know as the cockpit voice recorder. Putting recorders on planes would seem to be an obvious step for an industry that celebrates safety. But when Warren pitched his notion, he was turned down ﬂat. The Royal Australian Air Force claimed that his device would ‘‘yield more expletives than explanations.’’ The Federation of Australian Air Pilots declared that ‘‘no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening.’’ He ﬁnally persuaded British aeronautics experts to test his idea. Today, every commercial airplane contains a recorder in a ‘‘black box,’’ and we are all safer because of Warren’s advocacy.≥ Do you use unleaded gasoline? If so, Clair Patterson deserves your thanks. He pioneered the idea of eliminating harmful lead from fuel. Another ob- THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 3 vious innovation, right? Yet it took more than ten years for him to get his idea adopted, so great was the political opposition. Energy companies tried to stop his research funding; powerful industry opponents asked his university, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), to ﬁre him. But because of his tenacious advocacy, all of us breathe cleaner air today. When the Carnegie Foundation raised the idea of funding an educational television show for children, Joan Ganz Cooney’s boss at New York City’s Channel 13, Lewis Freedman, said he didn’t think she would be interested in the project. She interrupted to say that she most deﬁnitely would be. As discussion of the project proceeded, Freedman kept turning her down because he wanted her to continue to work on public affairs documentary projects (she had won an Emmy on one). She thought getting involved in the education show for children was hopeless until her husband had lunch (on an unrelated matter) with Lloyd Morrisett, head of the Carnegie Foundation. Ganz Cooney’s husband told Morrisett of his wife’s interest in doing the research. That prompted Morrisett to call Ganz Cooney’s boss and tell him she was the person he wanted to lead the effort. As Ganz Cooney will admit, it was ‘‘a little bit tricky’’ going around her boss.∂ In fact, she said later, the job would not have been hers if she hadn’t done so.∑ Her involvement didn’t grow any easier. When she ﬁnally completed the project and presented it to top executives, one of those attending the meeting asked, ‘‘Who are you?... Why would anyone be interested in your opinion?... I just think it’s crazy.’’∏ Luckily, Ganz Cooney turned out to be a relentless advocate. Today, thanks to her, we all enjoy Big Bird, Elmo, and the rest of the gang on Sesame Street. Ever had a Big Mac? You can cheer Jim Delligatti, who owned some McDonald’s franchises in the Pittsburgh area in 1967. Disturbed that profits were not increasing, he borrowed an idea from the Big Boy restaurant chain and created the double burger on a bun. Did McDonald’s executives like his idea? Not at ﬁrst. Fred Turner, the company’s president, didn’t want to expand the menu. But Delligatti persevered. His regional manager bought the idea and made the case to senior executives. McDonald’s leadership ﬁnally told Delligatti that he could test his fancy new sandwich—but only at one of his restaurants, and he had to use McDonald’s products. The latter restriction sentenced his idea to failure, because the traditional hamburger bun was too small for two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onion. So Delligatti ignored instructions and ordered large sesame rolls to create the Big Mac. After sales at his Uniontown 4 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS restaurant shot up, he piloted the idea at other stores in the Pittsburgh area. Soon other McDonald’s stores started selling his sandwich.π Thanks to Delligatti’s advocacy, burger lovers throughout the world can sink their teeth into Big Macs. Each of these innovators, and many others introduced in the pages ahead, came to recognize that creative genius is seldom sufﬁcient to make great ideas viable. Persistent, well-considered advocacy is just as important. And advocacy is what this book is about. The products you ﬁnd on store shelves, the processes that make organizations safer, more efﬁcient, and proﬁtable, the innovations that let you live longer and better—all originally sprang from somebody’s mind. But these innovative products and processes didn’t magically appear the moment they were imagined. Instead, the idea for each one needed to be sold inside some organization before it became a reality. Victor Hugo was wrong when he wrote that an idea whose time has come cannot be stopped. Ideas can be stopped. Too often, brilliant ideas ﬂounder because of the inability or unwillingness of their creators to sell them to others. Indeed, how many great ideas for lifesaving drugs, world-changing technologies, and innovative business processes have fallen by the wayside simply because their proponents were unable to successfully advocate for their adoption? As the writer David Bornstein said: ‘‘An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it’s a masterpiece. Otherwise the play may never open; or it may open but, for lack of an audience, close after a week.’’∫ Organizations are crowded and noisy marketplaces of ideas. Every one of them has more needs than resources. The notions that get adopted win out not only because of their objective value but also because of their proponents’ skill at selling them. Skill at pitching ideas is well worth acquiring. People who can sell ideas are generally more successful and happier than those who have never developed that skill. Not being able to market their ideas, not reaping the rewards of being creative, can make people feel impotent and ultimately cynical. Consider a few cases. In a California technology ﬁrm, a talented engineer is disgruntled because another engineer keeps getting funded and he doesn’t, even though he has many more patents. A mid-level executive in a British ﬁnancial ﬁrm recognizes a fellow walking past as a former employee and now his boss. A dedicated scientist in India complains that a colleague gets credit for an idea that was hers long before he talked it up and persuaded the company decision makers of its merits. THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 5 These individuals are all bright and energetic. They didn’t begin their careers as whiners or cynics. In their own minds, they have done everything right—they have worked diligently, demonstrated creativity, and exhibited loyalty and dependability—yet others in their organizations have more money, status, and inﬂuence. They make the mistake, however, of assuming that having good ideas is enough. This point is crucial. What they fail to grasp is how vital advocacy is to success. Chuck Fox, appointed in 2009 to manage the environmental quality of the world’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay, addresses this point. When advocating, he says, ‘‘you need to have the science completely on your side. You need to have a policy well thought out. But if you don’t have the politics on your side, you lose.’’Ω The Idea-Advocacy Matrix How do you get politics on your side when you have an idea to pitch? That is what this book is about. Figure 1 lays out the two key dimensions that we will be discussing. One dimension relates to the quality of an idea. Some notions are really dumb; others are brilliant. (Most ideas, of course, fall somewhere in the middle of the quality dimension.) In a perfect world, good ideas win out over bad ones. If someone proposes a brilliant notion, it is adopted (and its inventor is rewarded handsomely). And if someone Quality of Idea Ineffective Advocacy for Idea Good (1) (3) Lucky Lost Break Opportunity Effective Poor Wasted (2) Investment (4) SUCCESS! Figure 1. The Idea-Advocacy Matrix If new ideas are to gain the attention and support of decision makers, they must be touted in memorable and persuasive ways. A winning idea is strong in two dimensions: the quality of the idea is good, and the advocacy for the idea is effective. 6 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS pitches a stupid idea, it is dismissed out of hand. In the real world, good ideas frequently falter, alas, and bad ideas too often receive accolades. Vital to getting an innovation adopted is a second dimension—advocacy. If new ideas are to win the attention and support of decision makers, they must be touted in memorable and persuasive ways. Combining the dimensions of quality and advocacy yields four quadrants. Quadrants 1 and 2: Poor Ideas The ﬁrst two quadrants relate to poor ideas that are advocated with varying degrees of skill. Quadrant 1: Lucky Break. People sometimes have really bad ideas, and we are all relieved when they can’t ﬁnd buyers. Poor ideas that can’t be sold fall into quadrant 1. It is a lucky break for all when someone can’t sell a bad idea. Quadrant 2: Wasted Investment. When someone succeeds in selling a bad idea, money, time, and energy are expended on what is a wasted investment. We have all seen it happen. Someone with great advocacy skills convinces decision makers to adopt an idea that won’t sell, will be too costly, will create unnecessary work, or will cause harm. Think of the successful advocacy for the massive use of DDT in agriculture, which led to deaths of some animal species and increases in certain sorts of cancer, the introduction of nonnative species like kudzu or the Asian carp that wipe out native plants or animal populations, the recommendation in Europe that pregnant women combat morning sickness with Thalidomide, which resulted in the birth of many deformed children, the hype about not vaccinating children against fatal diseases such as whooping cough and measles, which has brought fatalities in its wake, British Petroleum’s decision to use apparently cheap methods when constructing a deep ocean oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which resulted in a disastrous oil spill. The list is endless. Some ﬂawed ideas revolve around speciﬁc products. In 1972, experts persuaded the state of Florida to dump a million used tires into the waters off the coast. Goodyear even distributed pamphlets that said, ‘‘Worn out tires may be the best things that have happened to ﬁshing since Izaak Walton.’’ The author of The Compleat Angler would have been horriﬁed by the results. Today Florida is engaged in a massive cleanup because the tires are ruining natural reefs and destroying ﬁsh life.∞≠ Remember ‘‘New Coke’’? If its promoters within Coca-Cola hadn’t been successful in pitching the idea inside the company, it never would have hit THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 7 the shelves—and sat there unbought. Its failure is a legendary instance of a wasted investment. Consultants and employees alike sold United Airlines on an automatic baggage-handling system at the Denver International Airport. After spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on the system, United decided, in 2005, that going automatic was a lousy idea and switched back to a traditional system. In October 2007 the drug giant Pﬁzer took Exubera, an inhaled diabetes medication, off the market, taking an almost $3 billion loss. Why? Not because it didn’t work and not because it was unsafe. Inhaling a medication simply didn’t appeal to customers. People inside Pﬁzer had successfully advocated for an idea that turned out to be a ﬂop. Environmentalists in the Netherlands cheered when they discovered that a palm oil from Southeast Asia might replace petroleum as a biofuel. They successfully advocated for government subsidies for companies that produced generators to burn palm oil. But they soon discovered that their idea to help stop global warming and save the environment was counterproductive. Meeting the demand for palm oil had horrifying environmental consequences in Southeast Asia: millions of acres of rain forest were devastated, rich soil was destroyed through the overuse of chemical fertilizers, and huge amounts of carbon emissions were released from draining and then burning peatlands.∞∞ Other ﬂawed ideas concern less tangible items. In one company, a seasoned advocate sold the idea of moving customer support offshore. As it turned out, customers wanted support personnel with an intuitive understanding of their individual issues. They mutinied against the company and migrated to competitors. In another ﬁrm, corporate communication managers touted moving their company’s internal newsmagazine to the Web. The rationale was simple: it would save lots of money. Six months later, after an expensive switchover, company executives were stunned to discover that no one was reading the Web-based materials. Vital information was not reaching employees. So the company had to go back to the old print format, which people could take home, to lunch, to the restroom. Most advocates don’t know their ideas will backﬁre. Their notions seem great at ﬁrst. Wilhelm Normann created what we now know as trans fats (bad for your body); Thomas Midgely invented and campaigned for Freon (bad for the atmosphere) as well as leaded gasoline (bad for the body). 8 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS And even failed ideas can teach valuable lessons. Some argue that Coke gained a huge marketing advantage from the failure of New Coke (in selling ‘‘Classic Coke’’).∞≤ But such lessons are often quite costly, and many of the people involved in a botched project wish the failed idea had never seen the light of day. Quadrants 3 and 4: Good Ideas Let’s look at the other two quadrants of ﬁgure 1, which show what happens with good ideas. Quadrant 3: Lost Opportunity. If you have a genuinely great idea but can’t get decision makers to adopt it, your idea becomes a lost opportunity. It is the ideas in this quadrant that led to the writing of this book. When good ideas languish, companies lose the prospect of making money, and creative employees leave or become cynical. Business history is dotted with stories of opportunities lost because people within companies were unsuccessful in pitching their ideas. And those neglected opportunities were consequential. Competitors seized market share that could have been kept and increased if the good idea had been adopted. Take the minivan. Who came up with that idea—Chrysler? No. Ford engineers came up with that idea—they called it the van-wagon—but they couldn’t convince management that customers would buy it. In fact, one executive who endorsed it, Hal Sperlich, was ﬁred and went on to lead the effort at Chrysler, which then dominated the minivan world for many years.∞≥ Ford lost out. In 1998, Andrew Burrell and his colleagues at a computer ﬁrm called DEC created a tiny music player called the Personal Juke Box. DEC was being sold to Compaq at the time, and Burrell tried to sell his idea to executives at Compaq. But as one researcher reports, ‘‘When Compaq bought DEC, they basically got the whole research thing completely by accident. Once they found out it was there, a number of VPs started putting plans in place to kill it. We tried pretty hard to interest product groups, but they didn’t have the vision that this thing [the digital music player] could have a very wide audience.’’∞∂ The executives at Apple were more receptive to the idea of a tiny music player and made history—and pots of money—with the iPod. Nokia engineers had the idea of a large touch screen for phones long before Apple introduced the iPhone, but management rejected the notion. Opportunities lost! Failure to advocate a good idea effectively may mean that competitors THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 9 gain an edge. But it may also mean that the development of a great idea is delayed. Many years ago, Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi was convinced that his company should be in the video-game business. So he proposed that Sony create what we now know as the PlayStation. Sony executives dismissed his idea and moved Kutaragi to a small ofﬁce outside Tokyo where he nonetheless continued his campaign. He ﬁnally succeeded, but only after selling computer chips that handled sound to Nintendo (if competitors are interested in sound technology, we should be, too) and convincing the head of Sony Music that a PlayStation with a compact disc could be a good platform for people wanting to play Sony Music CDs. He told Fast Company that his ‘‘success had come despite the system, not because of it.’’∞∑ Companies unreceptive to advocacy efforts often discover that their brightest ‘‘idea people’’ leave in search of more hospitable homes elsewhere. Some of today’s most successful companies were created by individuals who were unable to convince movers and shakers within their former organizations of the merits of their ideas. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, started his career as a franchisee in the Ben Franklin chain of stores. Walton tried to convince the Ben Franklin executives that his model of buying directly from manufacturers and offering deep discounts would lead to incredible opportunities. They didn’t listen, Walton implemented the idea himself, and Walmart became an international phenomenon. Ron Hamilton came up with the idea of making disposable contact lenses while working at CooperVision. After discovering a way to cheaply massproduce lenses that could be changed monthly, Hamilton pitched his idea to management. He was turned down ﬂat. Why? His idea threatened the part of the company’s business that included cleaning ﬂuids: with disposable lenses, people could toss away their lenses instead of cleaning them. So Hamilton left CooperVision and started a company that two years later was purchased for close to $40 million. Today almost everyone who wears contacts uses disposable ones.∞∏ Eugene Kleiner and many other early innovators left William Shockley’s Semiconductor Laboratory in the late 1950s when they failed to convince him of the merits of silicon. Joining a small company named Fairchild, these rebels soon dominated the semiconductor industry. Later Gordon Moore and other creative thinkers at Fairchild left to create Intel for a similar reason. Moore recalls that he was frustrated at Fairchild because 10 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS ‘‘it was increasingly difﬁcult to get our new ideas into the company’s products. As the company grew, it became more and more difﬁcult to transfer the ideas and the new technology.’’∞π Steve Wozniak, a cofounder of Apple Computers, was working at HewlettPackard when he and Steve Jobs designed their ﬁrst personal computer. Wozniak had signed a document at HP saying that whatever he designed as an employee belonged to HP. He said, ‘‘I loved [HP]. That was my company for life. So I approached HP.... Boy, did I make a pitch. I wanted them to do it. I had the Apple I, and I had a description of what the Apple II could do. I spoke of color. I described an $800 machine that ran BASIC (an early computer language), came out of the box fully built and talked to your home TV. And Hewlett-Packard found some reasons it couldn’t be a Hewlett-Packard product.’’ Later, when HP began work on a computer, Wozniak approached the project managers and asked to work on it. ‘‘I really wanted to work on computers. And they turned me down for the job. To this day I don’t know why. I said, ‘I don’t have to run anything,’ even though I’d done all these things and they knew it. I said, ‘I’ll do a printer interface. I’ll do the lowliest engineering job there is.’ I wanted to work on a computer at my company and they turned me down.’’∞∫ Think how different the computer industry would be if Wozniak had successfully pitched his ideas to HP. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, the founders of Adobe, the secondbiggest company in the world making software for personal computers, were working at Xerox when they came up with their idea of computerbased publishing, known as Postscript. As Warnock told a San Jose newspaper, ‘‘We started [Adobe] out of frustration with the employer that we had because we were building great stuff and there was no way that this stuff was ever going to get into the hands of the people who could use it.’’∞Ω The inventors spent two years trying to sell the idea within Xerox before they left to create their own company. Craig Venter left the National Institutes of Health when his proposal to use ‘‘whole-genome shotgun sequencing’’ was rejected. He went on to create his own company, where the ﬁrst decoding of a whole bacterial genome was completed. That discovery was heralded by Nobel laureate James Watson as a ‘‘great moment in science.’’≤≠ THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 11 At ﬁrst reading, you might think that the real issue in these cases is not advocacy but rather the unwillingness of companies to listen to gifted employees. You would be right. These organizations weren’t attentive enough, and brilliant individuals jumped ship in search of more receptive audiences. It is essential that executives create cultures in which good ideas are recognized and supported. Leaders too often have no idea of who is doing the most innovative work. Koichi Tanaka, for instance, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003 for his work on protein-molecule analysis. The company he worked for, Shimadzu, a Japanese precision-engineering ﬁrm, saw little value in commercializing his invention until after researchers in other nations had done so and had given Tanaka recognition for the work. In fact, until he won the Nobel Prize, he was a low-level ‘‘salary man.’’ Afterward, the president of Shimadzu told reporters that although he had met Tanaka a few years earlier, he ‘‘could not have imagined’’ that he would ever be a Nobel laureate.≤∞ Only after receiving the Nobel Prize was Tanaka promoted to a senior position. The inability of leadership to recognize and commercialize great ideas is only part of what happens when ideas fall into Quadrant 3. Responsibility also lies with the people who came up with the ideas in the ﬁrst place. In many cases, innovative people are not effective salespeople. They either don’t know how to promote their ideas or don’t want to. Either way, their ideas falter. Promising ideas must be merchandised. The paradigmatic case of a lost opportunity must be Xerox. In the early 1970s, the company assembled some of the world’s brightest computer scientists at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California. Their task was wide open: push forward with vital, interesting projects. Out of this lab came extraordinary innovations. One was the ﬁrst PC to include graphical user interface (the Xerox Alto). Another was Ethernet. But Xerox, at the corporate level, did amazingly little to capitalize on these inventions. Beyond the reputational loss, how much money did Xerox lose by not exploiting the scientists’ work? Billions. According to Steve Jobs, if Xerox had harvested all of the PARC inventions, today it would be richer than IBM, Microsoft, and Xerox combined.≤≤ Why did Xerox miss its opportunity? Perhaps because PARC researchers didn’t understand that they not only had to invent things but also had to sell their inventions. Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander, in their classic study of the Xerox debacle, argue that much of the problem at Xerox was a culture 12 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS clash between young scientists and corporate executives. Most of the researchers had just ﬁnished school. Pony-tailed mavericks, they had little respect for people in suits. As one scientist recalls, ‘‘When we felt sometimes that someone was not worth talking to, we sometimes told them that.’’≤≥ These inventors burned rather than built bridges. Even the more mature leaders of PARC sometimes didn’t grasp the value of pitching ideas as commercial opportunities. For example, when George Pake, a scientiﬁc leader at PARC, presented one of the center’s ideas to executives at Xerox, he emphasized the technological challenges that still needed to be overcome, not the idea’s business potential.≤∂ And Robert Taylor, one of the founders of PARC, famously said, ‘‘I was hired to produce the best technology I could. If the product group [at Xerox] was not able to take advantage of our technology a lot of people are culpable, not me.’’≤∑ Quadrant 4: Success. Quadrant 4 is the home of good ideas that have been promoted effectively. Great ideas that have been successfully sold within organizations fall in this box. Construction: In 1941, the many thousands of people working in Washington, DC, for the United States Army were spread across more than seventeen buildings. General Brehon Somervell, an accomplished administrator, imagined a single mammoth building to house them all. Because of his successful advocacy, the government constructed the largest building in the world. First labeled ‘‘Somervell’s Folly,’’ it is now considered a national landmark: the Pentagon. Automobile Industry: J. Mays and Freeman Thomas worked at Volkswagen’s California Design Center. It took them three years to convince the leadership of VW to resurrect the famous Beetle. ‘‘The design only took three days,’’ says Mays. ‘‘Selling the project took three years.’’≤∏ Agriculture: G. C. ‘‘Jack’’ Hanna, a professor of vegetable crops at the University of California, Davis, teamed with an engineering faculty member, Coby Lorenzen, to create a mechanical tomato harvester. Hanna’s colleagues thought the idea ridiculous, but six years later, Hanna’s equipment was harvesting virtually 100 percent of California’s tomato crop.≤π Computer Technology: Bernie Meyerson, an IBM researcher, contended that far greater processing speeds could be achieved if germanium were added to computer chips. For years, nobody at IBM accepted his notion. He kept campaigning and convinced his skeptics. IBM made billions as a result. THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 13 Consumer Products: Art Fry of 3M created the Post-it Note. His managers saw little value in a small sticky piece of paper. So, without anyone’s permission, he created prototypes and even built a machine to make them. He distributed prototypes to secretaries of 3M executives. Days later, the secretaries asked Fry for more. Fry told them he didn’t have any more. They ought to persuade their bosses to support his idea. And now we have Post-it Notes.≤∫ Lighting: Japanese engineer Shuji Nakamura spent ten years creating blue LEDs at Nichia, a tiny chemical company on Shikoku island. Managers continually urged him to work on other projects, and his coworkers harassed him, telling him that he should quit, that he was wasting company money, but he kept insisting that he was close to an important discovery. He ﬁnally created an effective blue LED, and Nichia has reaped millions from his innovation.≤Ω Technology: Tetsuya Mizoguchi, an engineer at Toshiba, argued with company executives about the importance of devising a portable computer. They dismissed the idea: it would never amount to much. Mizoguchi kept making his case, and the leadership ﬁnally saw the light. Today millions of people own a laptop.≥≠ Photoduplication: Xerox entered the laser-printer market mostly because of a strong selling job by the head of the company’s printing division, Jack Lewis. Lewis pushed for the printer despite direct orders from senior leaders to kill the project that eventually led to the printer.≥∞ If Lewis had stopped pushing, the company would have lost a hugely lucrative opportunity. Pharmaceuticals: Richard Miller, a researcher in 3M’s pharmaceutical unit, developed a new sort of immune-response modiﬁer to treat genital and perianal warts. His bosses were so skeptical of his work that they told him to move on to another project. Miller persisted anyway. Today his product, marketed under the name Aldara, yields millions in annual sales. Financial Services: In 1997, David Pottruck, a senior executive at the Charles Schwab brokerage ﬁrm, persuaded his ﬁrm’s leadership to make a very risky move: to create a full-service Internet brokerage business and charge a commission of only $29.95 for up to 1,000 shares. Pottruck knew the move would initially reduce earnings commissions the company received for trading equities. In fact, since the company’s leaders’ compensation 14 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS was tied to earnings, his idea would probably take money out of executives’ pockets. Making the move was a huge gamble. But Pottruck succeeded in his advocacy, and Schwab took a leadership role in Internetbased trading. Over the next three years, trading volume skyrocketed 183 percent, and proﬁts doubled.≥≤ Medicine: Two Australian physicians, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, spent almost twenty years trying to convince peers that bacteria cause peptic ulcers. Prestigious doctors ignored and ridiculed the notion, and medical journals were reluctant to publish their research. Before their advocacy was successful, peptic ulcers were often linked to stress and were treated by surgery. Today, patients swallow a pill, and their ulcers disappear, while Marshall and Warren enjoy a Nobel Prize in Medicine in recognition of their work. Mail Delivery: Joe Perrone worked at FedEx in New York City. He often saw harried customers rushing right past a FedEx truck on their way to a FedEx drop box. ‘‘Hey,’’ Perrone wondered, ‘‘why not cut a slot in each FedEx truck? That way customers, when spying a truck, could drop their packages into the slot.’’ Customers would save time, and pickups might be faster, too. Perrone had to get a stamp of approval from seven different company units, which he procured by asking people in each unit how he could make it work for them. As he told the Washington Post, ‘‘Since I was the one willing to [do] all the legwork, they said, ‘If you want to knock yourself out, go right ahead.’ ’’≥≥ Today, thousands of FedEx trucks have little slots on their side panels thanks to Perrone’s successful advocacy.≥∂ What do all of these idea champions, some famous and others less so, have in common? They understood that for their ideas to be realized, they had to become advocates. Advocacy is an exhausting but necessary skill. Thomas Edison, a model of advocacy, was brilliant at generating publicity for his ideas and obtaining funding for them. Robert Fulton didn’t invent the steam engine, but he successfully advocated using a steam engine to power boats; even before he tested his version of a steam engine, he had to sell his idea to wealthy investors. When the creator of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, took aspiring entrepreneurs for tours around his Boston Back Bay mansion, he reminded them that he didn’t acquire the mansion because he invented the Ethernet. He acquired it after spending a decade promoting the idea.≥∑ Don’t misunderstand. Although many of the ideas described above are THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 15 world-shaking, most ideas advocated in organizations every day are mundane. They involve reorganization, or product modiﬁcation, or a different approach to an issue, or an improvement in a process. They are about using a different vendor, promoting an employee, or convincing management to change work hours. They are still important. Most of the things that today make organizations successful and jobs pleasant were small ideas that employees successfully sold within their ﬁrms. Advocacy is not limited to convincing skeptical leaders to try out something new; colleagues need convincing, too. Bringing ideas to market nowadays almost always requires team efforts. Advocates also often need to sell ideas to subordinates—which means that top executives need to be brilliant advocates. The chief executive ofﬁcer who turned J. C. Penney around, Allen Questrom, told the Wall Street Journal that one of the biggest challenges in leading a large organization through change was selling the strategy to employees.≥∏ Perhaps Boeing’s CEO, James McNerney, said it best when describing his board of directors: ‘‘I’m just one of eleven with a point of view. I have to depend upon my power to persuade.’’≥π What Is Advocacy? Advocacy means persuading people who matter to care about your issue. It is about getting listened to, being at the table when decisions are made, being heard by people who make decisions. It is about facing and overcoming resistance. It is about speaking and writing in compelling ways that make decision makers want to adopt your ideas. Sometimes advocates champion brand-new ideas, and sometimes they suggest modiﬁcations to existing processes, products, and problems. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, but he created a new process to make it; Michael Dell didn’t invent the computer, but he came up with an innovative process to sell it; Amazon didn’t invent books, but it devised a new way to distribute them, as did Netﬂix for ﬁlms. Advocates might propose decreasing or increasing the investment their ﬁrm makes in an initiative; they might request changes to budgets, promote the reorganization of work processes, sell a training initiative, accelerate development cycles, argue that a project needs to be kept alive, or suggest candidates for important positions. Advocacy means overcoming obstacles. Unsophisticated advocates think they have been successful when decision makers give them a ﬁrst nod; wise advocates know they must keep selling long after an idea is launched. 16 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS Studies of product development ﬁnd that administrative activities account for 90 percent of the time it takes to get products to market.≥∫ So successful advocates often must persuade slow organizational bureaucrats to speed up processes. Advocacy is also involved in attempts to stop or delay bad ideas. Indeed, when people pitch ideas that fall in Quadrant 2 (Wasted Investment), the arguments that others make to oppose those ideas are prime examples of advocacy. While working as a scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, Frances Kelsey was an extraordinary advocate against the introduction of thalidomide into the United States. The drug, created in the 1950s in Europe to reduce morning sickness among pregnant women, often resulted in serious birth defects. She persuaded the FDA’s leadership that further testing was necessary before the drug could be approved. And she relentlessly challenged the drug’s manufacturer for data that they tried to hide. For her work she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service—the highest honorary award the federal government grants career civilian employees. More important, children in the United States never suffered the horrendous problems that came from thalidomide. Advocacy is as important in nonproﬁt settings as in for-proﬁt settings. Fund-raisers must coax people to donate money, time, and ideas. In government, the ability to sell agendas and propose alternatives to agenda items requires incredible advocacy skills. Robert Rubin, former secretary of the treasury and former head of Goldman Sachs, summarized the role of advocacy in government this way: ‘‘Having a signiﬁcant inﬂuence ordinarily requires not only an important piece of work but also a shrewd sense of how to get attention in the media, Congress, and elsewhere in ofﬁcial Washington.’’≥Ω Finally, advocacy is about empowerment—about giving smart and dedicated people the opportunity to have an impact, to make sure their hard work is recognized, appreciated, and used. People want to make their ideas happen, partly for the psychic rewards—being listened to and making a contribution—and partly for material rewards, since successful advocates of transformational ideas can reap huge commercial payoffs. Of course, many advocates never get credit for their work. Even through Charles Momsen invented and campaigned for a diving bell to rescue sailors stuck in submarines, the United States Navy opted to name the bell the McCann Rescue Chamber. Certain Naval leaders felt that Momsen had embarrassed THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 17 them with his insistent advocacy, so they gave the laurel instead to one of Momsen’s colleagues who had contributed to the project.∂≠ General William ‘‘Billy’’ Mitchell fared even worse than Momsen. Mitchell’s strong advocacy for air power in the military in the early twentieth century ultimately proved successful, but it also led to his court-martial. Advocacy isn’t only about getting personal credit for an innovation, gratifying though that can be. Organizations proﬁt, too. The future of any ﬁrm depends on the ability of its talented people to passionately and successfully promote innovative ideas. Successful advocates are catalysts for change. Organizations prosper because innovations are directly associated with revenue growth, market share, market value, and even the survival of the ﬁrm. Societies, too, advance through innovations. Economists estimate that half of the economic growth in the world over the past ﬁfty years can be attributed to technological innovations.∂∞ Every one of those innovations had to be advocated within some organization before it appeared in the marketplace. Advocacy Skills for Everyone Business scholars Gina O’Connor and Mark Rice studied the development of many signiﬁcant innovations in large companies such as IBM, DuPont, and General Motors. They found that low- and mid-level researchers were often the ﬁrst to recognize new opportunities. However, recognition is only the ﬁrst step. Advocacy must follow. Inﬂuential managers who understood both the markets and the new ideas were crucial for pushing innovations.∂≤ Successful CEOs certainly champion innovations. Legendary business leaders like Darwin Smith (Kimberly-Clark), James Burke ( Johnson & Johnson), and William Allen (Boeing) each faced huge challenges in convincing employees, board members, and customers that major changes were needed: Kimberly-Clark needed to sell everything that had made the company great for almost a century, Johnson & Johnson needed to handle a massive product-tampering problem, and Boeing needed to move from being solely a defense contractor to creating planes that virtually every major commercial airline in the world could—and does—use. Each of these executives had splendid advocacy skills. But people at the lowest levels of a ﬁrm can ﬁnd themselves advocating for ideas. A janitor may have a great notion for rearranging the sequence in which 18 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS equipment is maintained. An experienced administrative assistant may discover a useful technique for dealing with a difﬁcult client. A security guard may pitch an idea for enhancing the safety of a facility. Someone doesn’t have to have an original idea to be an advocate. Advocates can play the vital role of selling other people’s ideas to decision makers. A major responsibility of managers is to sell the ideas of their subordinates to high-level decision makers. Indeed, employees are far more satisﬁed with their supervisors when they perceive that their supervisors can inﬂuence those higher up.∂≥ Regardless of how crucial advocacy is, most people know surprisingly little about how to pitch ideas successfully. In one study, conducted by Swiss researchers, 98 percent of executives from throughout the world who were surveyed reported that they had experienced difﬁculty selling an idea within their organization.∂∂ While many executives and business pundits praise the value of innovation, few highlight the importance of selling innovations. Instead, we read commentaries like one found in the Economist Technology Quarterly: ‘‘Above all, companies need to separate their perception of the value of an idea from the way it is presented, or the track record of the person proposing it.’’∂∑ Value, presentation, and individual can’t really be separated. A valuable idea that is not sold within a ﬁrm is not going to see the light of day, no matter what its merits. Most books and articles about product development ignore the marketing of innovations within organizations. The texts make product development sound impeccably logical, even sterile. They describe what make some products more successful in the marketplace, the stages of new product development (e.g., strategy development, idea generation, product screening, business analysis, product development, test marketing, commercialization), formal decision-making criteria (go/no-go tollgates; sensitivity analysis; risk analysis), the availability of new technologies, and so on. What you don’t read about in those books are the emotions, misunderstandings, rivalries, bureaucratic hurdles, politics, and other interpersonal dynamics that experienced product developers know they have to deal with to get an idea adopted. Anyone who has worked in an organization knows that politics can matter as much as business issues when decisions are made.∂∏ Everyone in an organization is vying for money, people, space, and other resources. As Bill Drayton, the founder of the social entrepreneurship organization Ashoka, says, ‘‘I don’t believe that conceiving an idea and marketing an idea are different.’’∂π ‘‘Politics is as important as the policy,’’ says THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 19 former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, ‘‘because if the politics doesn’t work, the policy—no matter whether the decisions are sensible or not— won’t be implemented.’’∂∫ Moving from idea to implementation is as much a social and political process as it is a rational one—and maybe even more so. Some people believe the ability to advocate is something you either have or don’t have. As an engineer at a large oil-services ﬁrm said, ‘‘I’m just not good at that sort of stuff,’’ referring to his inability to champion ideas. At ﬁrst glance, he may be right. Academic studies show that people who successfully champion ideas in organizations are innovative risk-takers who have a strong need to achieve.∂Ω They are adaptive and believe they have a great deal of control over their lives.∑≠ As leaders, they are self-conﬁdent, inspirational, and charismatic, as well as intellectually stimulating.∑∞ They probably have a great deal of ‘‘emotional intelligence.’’ Yet personality doesn’t account for everything. In any organization you hear stories about people who successfully pitched ideas but who had none of the advocacy characteristics identiﬁed in personality studies. Anyone, at any age, can learn to effectively pitch ideas. With time, experience, and the skills discussed here, people of all types and backgrounds can become successful advocates. Even experienced advocates must hone their skills when their jobs change. George Marshall, in reﬂecting on his ﬁrst years of being chief of staff of the U.S. military during the Second World War, said: ‘‘It became clear to me at the age of 58 I would have to learn new tricks that were not taught in the military manuals or on the battleﬁeld. In this position [chief of staff ] I am a political soldier and will have to put my training in rapping-out orders and making snap decisions on the back burner, and have to learn the arts of persuasion and guile. I must become an expert in a whole new set of skills.’’∑≤ The Downside to Advocacy Let’s acknowledge that advocacy has its negative aspects. First, advocacy skills can be used to resist good ideas. If an idea is a bad one, successful advocacy lets people effectively oppose it. Yet, in the political give-and-take of an organization, advocates can also use the skills described in this book to crush valuable ideas for their own advantage: An executive argues to maintain a unit that obviously needs to be shut down just because he wants more ‘‘head count’’; a manager persuades her boss not to adopt another person’s brilliant idea because it might make her look bad; a scientist squashes an 20 THE POLITICS OF IDEAS innovative grant proposal because it threatens to make some of his research irrelevant. Second, advocacy can be used to champion bad ideas (think back to quadrant 2 in ﬁgure 1). Since the quality of an idea can matter less than the politics surrounding it, crafty advocates can cajole people into supporting ideas that fail miserably. Eve successfully persuaded Adam to eat that apple: good-bye, Eden. At NASA, some engineers and scientists urged the launch of Challenger in the cold January weather (the space shuttle was torn apart) and convinced their colleagues to ignore the tiles that fell off during the launch of Columbia (it broke up). Similarly, certain managers at Toyota downplayed the problems the company was facing in 2009 with the accelerator pedal that stuck in open position. In fact, a major reason why products fail in the marketplace is the overenthusiasm of managers during the development process.∑≥ Highly involved champions often wear blinders when it comes to their ideas. Indeed, they are especially overconﬁdent with pioneering ideas.∑∂ They ignore market evidence that fails to support their ideas.∑∑ While enthusiasm, focus, and conﬁdence are deﬁnitely plusses in promoting good ideas, these factors are equally compelling when promoting bad ideas. Sophisticated advocates can argue for bad ideas as well as good ones, and once ideas take hold in an organization, they are often hard to root out.∑∏ Even if advocates cannot successfully turn an idea into a reality, they can prolong decision making, costing organizations enormous amounts of money. The later the decisions are made to kill a project, the more expensive it is to kill it. ‘‘Fail early, fail cheap’’ is a wise maxim. Good advocacy can sometimes lead a company to persist with a bad plan or product for too long. Third, advocacy is associated with political risks. An advocate’s credibility may well be shattered if she bungles an attempt to advocate. An advocate’s reputation can be threatened if he touts a lemon. If the idea is rebuffed by management, ends up costing far more than it’s worth, or is rejected in the marketplace, the advocate is the one held responsible. A Framework for Advocacy More than twenty-ﬁve years ago, Gifford Pinchot wrote a book celebrating ‘‘intrapreneuring.’’ Its thesis was that successful companies let their employees’ great ideas blossom. Pinchot’s book was quite popular for a time, but attention to the topic faded, perhaps because the speciﬁc ways in THE POLITICS OF IDEAS 21 which people successfully sell ideas were never spelled out. The current book ﬁlls that void by describing what successful advocates do when pitching ideas. The chapters that follow illuminate the major skills required for successful advocacy. Effective advocates communicate clearly and memorably. Chapter 2 focuses on what it takes to ensure that people understand and remember the ideas being advocated. Chapter 3 shows how advocates frame their ideas so they have impact. Effective advocates build credibility and generate afﬁnity. People won’t willingly buy ideas from people they don’t like or trust. An advocate’s reputation is crucial to inspiring conﬁdence in his or her ideas. Chapter 4 offers a catalog of ways that advocates use to build and maintain their reputation. Effective advocates build relationships that let ideas prosper. It is almost impossible to successfully push big or even small ideas all by yourself. The processes are too complicated; the issues are too complex. Sophisticated advocates are often in the role of coordinator—marshaling relationships to ensure that ideas are heard and adopted. Shrewd advocates rally support through alliances (chapter 5) and networking (chapter 8). Effective advocates presell their ideas. One thing that is crystal clear about advocacy is that important decisions are often made long before formal meetings happen. Superb idea champions know how to presell their ideas. They build the groundwork before springing their ideas on decision makers. Preselling successfully requires the advocate to understand who makes decisions (chapter 7), time pitches perfectly (chapter 9), and offer vivid messages (chapter 12). Effective advocates inﬂuence others. At its core, advocacy is about persuasion. Good advocates grasp the value of narrative (chapter 6), understand techniques of persuasion (chapters 10 and 11), sound conﬁdent (chapter 13), and know how to manage meetings to gain the attention they think their ideas deserve (chapter 14). A hoary maxim says, ‘‘If you build a better mousetrap, people will beat a path to your door.’’ That maxim is wrong. People won’t beat a path unless they know you have a mousetrap, like and respect you, and are persuaded that your mousetrap is indeed better. When you ﬁnish reading this book, you will have the tools to successfully sell your mousetrap. 2 Communicate Your Idea with Impact Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulﬁllment. pearl buck Imagine that tomorrow morning you meet with your organization’s senior executives to pitch an idea you have been working on for the past six months. Your twenty-minute session is part of what your company calls its annual project reviews, when top decision makers hear from employees about their projects and budget needs for the coming year. A week from now, the executives will hold a private session to discuss all the projects, and you know that only a few will be vividly remembered, and even fewer will receive generous support. Most projects will have been all but forgotten by the time the executive session is held. What can you do to make sure decision makers remember your proposal amid the clutter of the many ideas that were raised in the review sessions? Part of the answer to this question lies in how clearly you communicate your idea. As the man who brought us the Post-it Note, 3M’s Art Fry, says, ‘‘It’s one thing to have an idea but if you can’t communicate it to others... you’re dead in the water.’’∞ Too often, people don’t communicate their ideas clearly enough. And even when the ideas are perfectly clear, decision makers frequently forget most of what they have heard. In fact, people recall less than 15 percent of what they have heard in recent conversations—and 22 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 23 about one-fourth of what they do recall is inaccurate.≤ In this chapter, we will discover what successful advocates do to clearly communicate their ideas in memorable ways. Know What You Want People to Know One of the biggest mistakes that unsophisticated advocates make is pitching their ideas before knowing exactly what they want decision makers to remember. They have a sense that something in the organization or one of its products or processes needs to change, but before taking the time to think through their ideas completely, they start to talk. Wise proponents, on the other hand, decide what they want to communicate before they start talking. They have a laserlike focus on the essential points that decision makers need to understand. These savvy proponents accept that not everything about their ideas is equally important. Some information is helpful but not essential; and some information, though interesting, is superﬂuous. Remember, the Declaration of Independence has fewer than 1,500 words; the Gettysburg Address, only 272 words. John Kennedy’s famous inaugural address lasted less than ﬁfteen minutes. The average television sound bite for a presidential candidate in the 2004 election was less than eight seconds long!≥ Try this exercise. Think of what you are proposing. Can you encapsulate the idea in fewer than 100 words? 50 words? 10 words? Look at a billboard on the street. With just a picture and a few words, you get the message. So what is your billboard? Young ﬁnancial analysts at Fidelity Investments quickly learned when pitching ideas to Peter Lynch, the company’s legendary stock picker, that ‘‘he really wanted to hear the story in a simpliﬁed way. What’s the main factor that’s driving this company? What’s going to make people want this stock?’’∂ Similarly, A. G. Laﬂey, the successful former CEO of Procter & Gamble, when presented with overly complex pitches, used to say, ‘‘Give me the Sesame Street version.’’∑ Stay on Message with Repetition and Redundancy Early in election campaigns, successful politicians, who are professional advocates by deﬁnition, identify themes that they want reporters and voters to pay attention to. Then they religiously stay ‘‘on message’’ in their speeches and ads. James Carville, the successful manager of Bill Clinton’s 24 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T ﬁrst presidential campaign, constantly reminded staffers during the campaign that the key message was ‘‘It’s the economy, stupid.’’ One way of staying on message is repetition. Years ago psychologists discovered the ‘‘mere exposure effect’’: the more often people see an object, the more positive they feel about it.∏ There is a wonderful story of a man who was so in love with a woman who lived far from him that every day, for 500 days, he mailed a love letter to her. On the 500th day, she married the postman. Exposure works. Up to a point, it can enhance decision makers’ feelings toward an idea.π When Intuit’s Dan Robinson wanted to convince colleagues that the company should develop software to help people manage medical expenses, he started off every conversation with ‘‘Health care is a $1.3 trillion business, and we [Intuit] don’t have a piece of it. Health care is messed up. There ought to be lots of ways to make it easier, and people will pay for that help.’’ Repetition worked. Intuit ﬁnally adopted his idea.∫ John Loose, former CEO of Corning, told of a similar approach. ‘‘We believe in the Rule of Six. When there is a message... you have to say it six times. You can’t have a meeting one day and check it off. You have to keep going back.’’Ω But repetition isn’t always helpful. It doesn’t work, for instance, when people don’t understand what is being said. In an intriguing series of studies, communication researchers had someone pretend to be lost. The ‘‘lost’’ person approached people in Davis, California, requesting directions to a well-known location. After getting directions, the lost individual acted confused and said he didn’t understand. At this point, what did many direction givers do? They gave the same directions in louder voices.∞≠ How helpful was that? If someone doesn’t understand what you are saying the ﬁrst time, how will repeating it help? Once something has been said a few times in the same way to the same people, that’s enough. People get annoyed with needless repetition. Successful advocates do more than repeat their ideas. They also restate key aspects of their ideas in alternative ways. Let’s call this being redundant.∞∞ As I use the terms here, repetition is saying the same thing again in the same way; redundancy is saying the same thing in different ways. Do you remember being confused by something a teacher explained in class? You might have approached her after class and asked her to explain the concept to you again. Too often, poor teachers repeated what they had said earlier. What you needed was for the teacher to be redundant—to explain C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 25 the concept in different ways by offering fresh examples or helpful metaphors. Effective advocates, like good teachers, are redundant when explaining their ideas. What are the ground rules for being usefully redundant? ≤ ≤ ≤ ≤ Offer multiple examples. Use different modalities. Value visual media. Move beyond slides and paper. Offer Multiple Examples When rescuers search for someone lost on a mountain, they often use signals from that person’s mobile phone through a technique called triangulation. They take one reading, move some distance and take a second reading, and then move in a different direction and take a third. They locate the person where those readings intersect. The same principle works when pitching ideas. Explaining ideas in multiple ways helps decision makers home in on what’s being proposed. So smart advocates normally employ at least two examples when introducing a concept. They know that if they offer only one, decision makers might confuse the concept with the example. Suppose you are explaining to a child how a lever and a fulcrum work. You show the child a picture of a farmer lifting a rock using them. ‘‘Ah,’’ the youngster says, ‘‘levers and fulcrums are farming equipment.’’ ‘‘No,’’ you reply, ‘‘not exactly.’’ Then you offer a second picture, this time of a seesaw at a playground. Now the child grasps the concept. This is why teachers, when assigning word problems in high-school math, never assign just one problem. Were students to do just a single item, they might confuse the speciﬁc problem with the underlying mathematical concept. Completing several problems helps them grasp the basic principle that the word problems were designed to teach. Redundancy of this sort works in organizations, too. Six Sigma is a collection of techniques used in companies to reduce unwanted variation, improve quality, and better manage processes. But Six Sigma advocates, to their chagrin, often ﬁnd that decision makers fail to understand how helpful the techniques can be outside of manufacturing and logistics. In fact, the methods employed in Six Sigma can be used to enhance almost any organizational function (e.g., sales, ﬁnancial management). Decision makers 26 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T think of Six Sigma so narrowly because proponents traditionally offer manufacturing or logistics examples. If they want people to see the generality of the approach, they could offer both a manufacturing example and an example drawn from, say, sales or human resources. Use Different Modalities People’s primary sensory preferences are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (tactile). Visually oriented people need to see the information; those who process information primarily in auditory ways prefer hearing it; and kinesthetic listeners like to touch things. Wise proponents use the preferred style of their listeners when pitching ideas. A prototype of a cell phone or an energy-efﬁcient washing machine has more impact with kinesthetically and visually oriented people than it does with those who prefer auditory information.∞≤ People who have a strong need to touch things feel far more conﬁdent in judging products they can touch, while people with less need to touch are comfortable making similar judgments without handling products.∞≥ Visually oriented decision makers have stronger positive reactions to aesthetically pleasing versions of products than do those who are less focused on their visual aspects.∞∂ While each of us may have a preferred modality, smart advocates use multiple modalities—auditory, visual, and kinesthetic—when communicating their ideas. There are three good reasons for doing so. First, advocates often address a diverse group of decision makers—some are visually oriented, others more auditory or tactile—so using all three modalities raises the chance that the proponents will connect to every one in the audience. Second, it is difﬁcult to identify even an individual’s media preference. Third, even if people’s preferences are obvious, there is still value in using different modalities. People process visual and auditory information in different parts of their brain. When proponents both talk about their ideas and provide working models of what they are proposing, their message ignites two parts of the brain. Abraham Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, said that Lincoln often sprawled out on a sofa and read aloud. Asked why he wouldn’t read quietly, Lincoln replied, ‘‘I catch the idea by two senses... when I read aloud I hear what I read and I see it, and hence two senses get it and I remember it better.’’∞∑ Academic research supports Lincoln’s belief: words accompanied by pictures are more persuasive than words alone.∞∏ C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 27 Value Visual Media: Seeing Is Believing Hospitals are unsafe places. One major reason that patients get sick (or sicker) is because hospital staff don’t wash their hands frequently enough. Just talking about the importance of washing hands and placing antibiotic soap in convenient locations doesn’t seem to work. Doctors and nurses still examine patient after patient without washing their hands in between. Rekha Murthy, an epidemiologist at the Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, was stymied: How could she foster hand washing? Then she came up with a powerful persuasive technique. At a meeting of the hospital’s top twenty physicians she asked each to press a palm into an agar plate, saying she ‘‘would love to culture your hand.’’ After the cultures developed, she photographed the bacteria that were present. The pictures were ‘‘disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.’’ One vivid photograph was made into a screen saver and placed on every computer in the hospital. Soon there was almost 100 percent compliance with the hospital’s hand-washing regimen.∞π People understood the message when they heard it, but they really understood it when they saw the picture. The maxim ‘‘A picture is worth a thousand words’’ is true. Visuals garner attention and humans have well-honed visual skills. We have used pictures for communication much longer than we have used words. Visuals are also efﬁcient for communicating many kinds of information. Wouldn’t you rather show someone a map than give directions in mere words? Wouldn’t you rather display an organizational chart than describe the same complex organizational structure verbally? Wouldn’t you rather demonstrate an Apple iPad than explain its capabilities with words alone? Visuals make advocates more persuasive.∞∫ Graphic pictures on cigarette packages are more effective at communicating the risks of smoking than text warnings are.∞Ω For years, Montgomery Ward produced an annual children’s Christmas story to promote the store’s brand name. In 1939, Robert Mays, a copywriter employed by Montgomery Ward, created one of the most memorable holiday stories we have: ‘‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’’ When he ﬁrst pitched his story, his boss balked at the idea of a red-nosed deer. In those days, red noses implied drunkenness. Mays asked a colleague and illustrator, Denver Gillen, to go to Lincoln Zoo in Chicago and sketch what a red-nosed deer might look like in a children’s tale. Mays brought Gillen’s drawing back to his boss, and the picture convinced him 28 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T that they could charm children with a deer with a large red nose—as indeed they have, for decades. While studying eBay auctions of nineteenth-century coins, two researchers, Charles Wood and Robert Kaufman, found that when pictures accompanied information about a coin’s age and condition, sellers received 12 percent more money than when they provided text-only offerings of the same coins. In addition, buyers gave sellers a higher ‘‘reputation score’’ when pictures were included in their auctions.≤≠ Throughout history, scientists, too, have used visuals as a crucial way of persuading doubters.≤∞ Geophysicist Clair Patterson, the scientist who made the case to stop using toxic leaded gasoline, persuaded many people of his argument by showing them three cartoon drawings, the famous ‘‘measles’’ cartoons (ﬁg. 2). The ﬁrst fellow had one dot on his chest, which represented the natural level of lead in a human body. The second man had 500 dots, representing the typical level of lead in an American in 1980. The third had 2,000 dots, representing the amount at which symptoms of lead poisoning are obvious. What was the point? People were slowly being poisoned to death by lead.≤≤ Politicians, those masters of advocacy, understand the value of the visual. As Charlene Barshefsky, President Clinton’s trade representative, said, ‘‘All the statistics in the world about export-related jobs don’t offset one picture of a closed factory whose loss is blamed on foreign competition.’’≤≥ David Stockman was head of the U.S. Ofﬁce of Management and Budget (OMB) during the early part of Ronald Reagan’s administration. Charged with balancing the budget, he sought to control military spending. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger adamantly opposed Stockman’s proposals to cut the military budget. In meeting with Reagan to make the military’s case, Weinberger displayed a cartoon showing three soldiers. As Stockman tells it, ‘‘One was a pygmy who carried no riﬂe. He represented the Carter budget. The second was a four-eyed wimp who looked like Woody Allen, carrying a tiny riﬂe. That was... me?... the OMB’s [proposed] defense budget. Finally, there was G.I. Joe himself, 190 pounds of ﬁghting man, all decked out in helmet and ﬂak jacket and pointing an M-60 machine gun menacingly.... This imposing warrior represented, yes, the Department of Defense budget plan.’’≤∂ Weinberger won the day. One reason why visuals are often more effective than words is because people remember visual information better than verbal information. Data presented in graphical form (e.g., a simple bar graph) have more impact C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 29 Figure 2. Lead in the Human Environment Clair Patterson’s cartoon depicts the amount of lead found in early humans, the average amount in Americans in 1980, and the amount symptomatic of lead poisoning. (Reprinted with permission from Lead in the Human Environment , by the National Academy of Sciences. Courtesy of the National Academies Press, Washington, DC.) than the same data presented as simple numbers.≤∑ During Reagan’s presidential reelection campaign, CBS aired a story showing him cutting a ribbon at a new nursing home and distributing medals to handicapped children who completed a race. As the video played on the home television screen, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl told viewers how Reagan had tried to cut funding for both nursing homes and the handicapped. Later that evening, one of Reagan’s aides phoned Stahl thanking her for the broadcast. She was surprised because she’d been pointing out hypocrisy in Reagan’s administration. But Reagan’s staff member knew that no one really listened to what she said; they looked at the pictures and gained an impression of Reagan’s kindness and generosity.≤∏ To be effective, visuals should match how decision makers think. For example, since people believe that upward slopes represent increasing rates, any graph showing growth should show upwardness. Visuals should be uncluttered, including only information directly relevant to the point being made. Bad PowerPoint presentations are ﬁlled with clutter—words come from every direction, sound effects evoke a bad karate movie, colors change randomly, distracting images ﬁll the background. The audience can become more intrigued by the seductive details of the slides than by what the speaker is saying. Finally, visuals should be simple. The simpler the visual, the easier it is for others to understand it and the more persuasive it is. The British Conservative Party, in its successful 1979 election campaign, 30 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T Figure 3. ‘‘Labour Isn’t Working’’ Visuals are compelling. This striking poster was used by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in the 1979 election campaign in Great Britain. The Labour Party lost. (Everett Collection, New York.) used a striking visual: a picture of a long line of people waiting outside an unemployment ofﬁce. Printed across the picture was the phrase ‘‘Labour isn’t working’’ (ﬁg. 3).≤π The Labour Party was the party of the incumbent prime minister, whom Margaret Thatcher hoped to replace. Since she was campaigning in a year when there was massive unemployment in Britain, that simple billboard communicated brilliantly her entire plan to ﬁx the economy by replacing the current government. At the end of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military identiﬁed top Iraqi leaders whom it wanted to arrest. Rather than just listing names on a sheet of paper, the military created ﬁfty-ﬁve playing cards, each containing the name, title, and photograph of one of the ‘‘most wanted.’’ Simple but powerful. Move Beyond Slides and Paper In the early twentieth century, U.S. military leaders were adamantly opposed to creating a powerful air force. They preferred giant battleships for waging war at sea. But General Billy Mitchell, a decorated First World War aviator, disagreed and, in the early 1920s, convinced military leaders to let him test his notion of using airplanes in sea battles. Several old battleships were taken to sea, and Mitchell’s planes ﬂew over them, dropping C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 31 bombs. Every ship was sunk. That demonstration was a big reason why U.S. airpower developed within the military. Mitchell understood that when decision makers see something, they have a hard time disbelieving it. Mitchell didn’t use slides or handouts. His visual was more striking—a demonstration of what he was proposing. Like Mitchell, many successful proponents go beyond slides and paper and persuade decision makers through working models and prototypes, real-life examples, personal experience, or visual props. One way of using visuals is to present a working model of the idea. The U.S. Patent Ofﬁce, from its beginnings in 1790 until 1880, required inventors to submit actual working models for inventions that they were seeking to patent. The reasoning was that an actual replica of the invention would prove its viability. If people could see it, they would believe it. Many innovations have been promoted by offering decision makers working models. Consider a few. Lew Urry devised the small alkaline battery in 1955 to replace the traditional carbon zinc battery. Management at his company, Eveready, wasn’t convinced that Urry’s proposed technology was a winner until he brought the company’s vice president of technology, R. L. Glover, into the company’s cafeteria, where Urry had two model cars waiting. One car used a traditional battery; the other used his new alkaline battery. The ﬁrst car barely moved; the second car went several lengths of the room— so far, in fact, that people in the cafeteria grew tired watching and went back to work. Next, Urry arranged to have the research director put two glowing ﬂashlights in his desk drawer, one powered by the carbon zinc battery, the other by an alkaline one. Opening the drawer hours later the director found the alkaline-powered ﬂashlight still shining brightly. The ﬂashlight using the carbon zinc battery was dead. As Urry said, ‘‘When you come up with an idea, you have to sell it to your bosses.’’ He sold his idea by demonstration.≤∫ David Warren’s attempts to promote his idea of a black box for airplanes were stymied until 1958, when the secretary of the Air Registration Board of the United Kingdom happened upon his demonstration unit while visiting the organization where Warren worked. The secretary asked Warren to demonstrate the cockpit voice recorder in the United Kingdom, and the response was phenomenal.≤Ω Had Warren not built his demonstration unit, his idea would have languished and died. 32 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T Thomas Edison faced an uphill battle convincing the public to switch from gas lighting to electric lighting. So he demonstrated his electric lights in ofﬁces that were easily seen by people working in the ﬁnancial district of New York and in the ofﬁces of major New York newspapers.≥≠ Edison knew that the ﬁnancial industry and the news business had to buy his idea if it was to succeed, and the best way to persuade them was to let them see his invention in action. It worked. Here’s what the New York Times said the day after Edison’s lights went on. ‘‘It was not till about 7 o’clock, when it began to grow dark, that the electric light really made itself known and showed how bright and steady it is.... It was a light that a man could sit down under and write for hours without the consciousness of having any artiﬁcial light about him.... The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight to have a light without a particle of ﬂicker and with scarcely any heat to make the head ache.’’≥∞ Mission accomplished! Some working models are prototypes—physical representations of what advocates have in mind. Prototypes often serve as proofs of concepts. If you make it—a model of a product or a working piece of software—you have proven that it can be put into use. Prototypes can convince decision makers that an idea is worth exploring. At the MIT Media Lab, a center for technology innovation, the motto was ‘‘Demo or die.’’ Without a demonstration, visitors wouldn’t understand the concepts that the scientists came up with. Prototypes work in every arena of innovation. Some prototypes are spare; they look like a completed product but are empty inside. The originator of the Palm PDA used a simple wooden block to communicate his idea of the size of the object he had in mind. The block ﬁt neatly into the breast pocket of his shirt. Spare prototypes are preferred when building a complete model is too expensive or when advocates want initial reactions to their notion. Sometimes, too, a spare prototype is designed to answer some basic questions, like size or shape. An architect’s model of a building is a spare prototype. There is nothing inside, but both the architect and the client can grasp what the ﬁnished building will look like. When you pitch an idea to experts, prototypes don’t have to be perfect; but for a naive or inexperienced audience, prototypes should look good and work perfectly. If you create a prototype of a piece of equipment with two panels out of alignment, some executives who are inexperienced in the C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 33 product design process may reject the entire idea; experienced engineers would know that the misalignment was a minor problem that could easily be ﬁxed later. Similarly, many consumers determine the quality of a new computer program by how it looks on the screen, not by its functionality. You don’t want to give decision makers any reason to dismiss your idea. In addition to working models, proponents sometimes use real-life examples of their ideas to convince decision makers. Whenever Jan Eliasson, president of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005, wanted to make the case about the need for unpolluted water in poor countries, he held up a full glass of water. He would say: ‘‘This glass of fresh, clean water is a common sight to us. But to two billion people in the world, it’s a luxury. I have seen a mother receiving a bottle [of water] while she has a child on her arm and witnessed that smile that says she knows that the only alternative is to walk for two or three miles, and then only to get polluted water.’’ He contrasts this sort of visual image with statistics: ‘‘You can break down ﬁgures that show that 300 million people south of the Sahara don’t have clean water. But working with images may be more important. If we can see relief in these concrete terms and remember this glass of water, then maybe we can be more action-oriented.’’≥≤ He might have learned this technique from James Grant, who served as the director of UNESCO for many years. Grant was convinced that the severe diarrhea that killed millions of children each year could be eliminated for a paltry sum if governments would hand out kits containing oral rehydration salts. So every time he met with a nation’s leader, he would pull a packet of these salts from his pocket. Holding the packet in his hand, he would ask the leader, ‘‘Do you know that this costs less than a cup of tea and it can save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives in your country?’’≥≥ The impact of Grant’s message was ampliﬁed by the presence of the packet. Physicist Richard Feynman explained why the O-rings had failed, causing the space shuttle Challenger to be torn apart, by using a visual prop during a congressional hearing. Feynman dropped an O-ring into a glass of ice water, pulled it out, and then showed the committee how brittle the ring had become. The weather on the day of the explosion had been unusually cold, which led to failure of the O-ring, which led in turn to the shuttle falling apart. The demonstration made his point persuasively. 34 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T Cemex executive Luis Farias convinced his company’s leadership to use petroleum coke, a residual material derived from processing petroleum, as an energy-efﬁcient fuel source for making cement. He was successful in his argument only after he took executives to a cement plant in Spain that already used the technology. Seeing the technology sold the idea.≥∂ When President Ronald Reagan wanted to celebrate American heroism, he began a trend in State of the Union speeches that continues to this day. While addressing Congress, Reagan pointed to a man sitting in the gallery, Lenny Skutnik, who had heroically rescued a woman from the freezing Potomac River after an airplane crash. Reagan could have simply said that Americans are brave, but the presence of Skutnik made it palpable. In 2009, when another president stood at the podium, US Airways pilot Chesley ‘‘Sully’’ Sullenberger, who had safely landed an A320 on the Hudson River, sat in the same seat, personifying American heroism. Advocates sometimes ﬁnd that the most successful ‘‘visual’’ involves participation by the decision makers themselves, who personally experience what is being proposed. Car salespeople let you drive the model you are considering; perfume store clerks provide testers at their counters. If you drive that car, you are more likely to buy it. If you wear that scent, you are more likely to choose it the next time you purchase perfume. Examples abound. Galileo Galilei, the great scientist and inventor, had an advocacy problem with his ﬁrst telescope. No one believed that it worked. How could anyone see something far away with pieces of glass? Galileo overcame people’s doubts by having them peer through his telescope and read the writing on far-off buildings. When Sony introduced its now-famous Walkman, the company needed to convince journalists that the product was marketable. Remember, the Walkman was a radical idea—a tape recorder that couldn’t record. So Sony took journalists to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, where each received headphones and a Walkman, and invited them to listen to a description of the product as they strolled through the park. This immediate experience helped journalists understand the idea of the Walkman. Motorola spent an enormous amount of money on a gamble: They created the ﬁrst cell phone before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had released frequencies for such a phone. But when the commis- C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 35 sion met to assign frequencies, it immediately awarded sole rights to the crucial high-frequency spectrum to AT&T, at that time the dominant telecommunication company in the United States. Stunned, Motorola asked for, and got, a second hearing. At that hearing, John Mitchell, the Motorola executive responsible for its cell-phone program, handed a Motorola cell phone (called the DynaTac) to one of the commissioners and let him make a call. Amazed, commission members reversed their prior decision and allowed competition for high-frequency bands.≥∑ As one of the phone’s creators, Marty Cooper, says, ‘‘The phone was pivotal. The FCC would never have made those moves without those demonstrations.’’ AT&T was stunned. ‘‘Motorola was politically much cleverer than we were. We were technical geniuses, but we didn’t know anything about lobbying and political stuff,’’ said Joel Engel, who led AT&T’s efforts.≥∏ Edwin Land, the inventor of polarized lenses, needed to convince the American Optical Company to buy his idea, so he invited company executives to a Boston hotel suite. Land placed a bowl ﬁlled with goldﬁsh near the sunny window. Land apologized for the glare and said he was sorry the executives couldn’t see the ﬁsh. ‘‘What ﬁsh?’’ the executives wondered. But when Land handed each of them a polarized lens (which eliminated the glare), the ﬁsh came into view. That demonstration persuaded them to make his product. Voilà, sunglasses.≥π In poor countries, inexpensive yet effective stoves are vital not only for cooking but for health. Wood-burning stoves that leak gases and smoke poison millions of people each year. In Oregon, near the Willamette River, the Aprovecho Research Center is where aﬁcionados of stoves create cheaper, safer, more durable stoves. A few decades ago, the dominant model stove was a clay one named the Lorena stove. It was easy to build and could be used even in the poorest parts of the world. Larry Winiarski, a local inventor, believed an alternative, something called a rocket stove, was much more effective. But people working at Aprovecho loved the old clay stove and ignored Winiarski’s initiatives. They ‘‘knew’’ the Lorena was best. So Winiarski designed an experiment. Next to the clay oven he built a rocket stove. He lit both stoves. The rocket stove, fueled with just a few twigs, got hot in less than a quarter hour. The traditional Lorena stove, ﬁlled with wood, wasn’t hot enough to cook bread after an hour. That demonstration won people over. Today the 36 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T rocket stove is considered one of the best models for cooking in the world.≥∫ The proof of Winiarski’s claim lay in the demonstration. Organize a Memorable Presentation Savvy advocates know that artful organization of persuasive messages is crucial to their effectiveness. The keys to good organization are: ≤ chunking information ≤ structuring the presentation ≤ using signposts Chunk Your Information When you have lots of information to convey, organize it into ‘‘chunks’’ to make it easier to remember. Try saying your telephone number aloud. If you live in the United States, you will probably pause slightly at the dashes. Each dash creates a chunk of numbers. In Mexico City, you don’t ﬁnd dashes, but there are spaces between groups of numbers. Seeing numbers in chunks makes it easier for us to remember them. In school, you learned the value of completing an outline before writing an essay. The outline forced you to chunk your ideas into meaningful units. Creating PowerPoint slides often serves the same function by forcing users to chunk ideas into bullet points. When information is chunked, three is the usual number of items. People in many cultures think in threes. According to southern German folk wisdom, all good things come in three. Ancient Greeks thought three was the perfect number. The Bible tells us about three wise men. More to the point here, a good presentation has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Great speakers know the further value of threes. At Gettysburg, Lincoln reminded us that ours is a government ‘‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’’ In World War II, Churchill told his compatriots, ‘‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few.’’ In an interesting series of studies, linguists found that people assume three points when listening to speeches.≥Ω Make two points and applause seldom erupts; make four points and applause begins as you start your fourth point. So, if you want people to remember what you are proposing try chunking the points you want to make into three major ones. C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 37 Structure Your Presentation In an experiment done years ago, psychologists told subjects to listen to a list of thirty words. Later, these people were asked to recall the words. Interestingly, they remembered far more words from the beginning and the end of the list than from the middle. Psychologists dubbed this ﬁnding the primacy-recency effect. For advocates, the primacy-recency effect means putting your key points at the beginning and the end of your presentation: start with the big news and ﬁnish with a bang. The authors of the 1994 Republican Contract with America strategically placed the two most important items—a balanced budget and term limits—ﬁrst and last, since they understood that most Americans would read only the beginning and the end of the document.∂≠ Unsophisticated advocates typically chatter pointlessly at the start of their pitch, put the critical material in the middle, and blather again at the end. No wonder people leave their presentations uncertain of their crucial ideas and not able to remember them. To take advantage of the primacy-recency effect, you must do more than just put your best arguments ﬁrst and last. You would be unwise, for example, to lead off with a highly controversial argument. Instead, begin with a strong point that is both important to your audience and apt to have their support. Now that your audience is disposed to listen and respond positively, you can transition to issues that are more controversial. Many successful advocates begin their pitches with statements of principles—things everyone can agree upon and, even more important, things they care about. What if you don’t have enough time to make an argument at both the beginning and the end of your pitch? Should you put your best issue ﬁrst or last? The answer is that if you plan to present only your own side of the issue, put your strongest argument ﬁrst, especially if decision makers are highly involved in the issue. But when presenting both sides of the argument, state your own position last.∂∞ If your audience is highly involved in what you are pitching, you should put your best argument ﬁrst because highly involved people listen carefully at the start, and once they have reached a decision, they are unlikely to change their mind. But if the decision makers have little interest in what you are pitching, or little familiarity with it, you should put your strongest argument last, since they are more likely to remember the last thing you say.∂≤ What if a decision will be made as soon as you ﬁnish talking? Then it is 38 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T wise to place the most important thing last (recency). If, by contrast, there will be a delay after you have pitched your idea—a lunch break or another meeting—put your key thought near the beginning. Advocates must also consider the attention span of decision makers. If their attention is likely to fade quickly, you might put your strongest arguments ﬁrst. What you say at the beginning may affect the decision makers’ moods. George W. Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2004 Republican national convention was structured strategically. The ﬁrst half was easygoing, indeed gentle. The second half was much stronger and tougher. Why? Bush’s advisors felt that a harsh start might scare swing voters. And they might change channels soon after the speech began. At the same time, hardcore Bush supporters would be glued to their televisions for the entire speech and would appreciate Bush’s strong close. Use Signposts Organized messages are better remembered than disorganized ones, and people who present well-organized messages are more positively regarded than those whose messages are chaotic.∂≥ One way of sounding organized is through ‘‘signposting.’’ In textbooks all sorts of signposts tell readers where they are and what to focus on: there are headings and subheadings; there are introductory paragraphs informing readers of what’s coming next; there are summary paragraphs reminding readers of what they just read. Signposts like these help people comprehend and remember. Signposts also help when making presentations at meetings. Smart advocates offer signposts by using their voice to highlight critical information; by offering people overviews before going into the body of their pitch; by providing succinct, compelling, clear summaries of what they say; and by often enumerating their points (e.g., ‘‘First, we will talk about the problem we discovered; second, we will look at various possible solutions; and third, we will make a recommendation’’). Advocate Face-to-Face In 1939, New York City ﬁnancier Alexander Sachs had a vital meeting scheduled with his good friend President Franklin Roosevelt. Sachs carried a letter from Albert Einstein warning Roosevelt that German scientists were developing an atomic bomb. Knowing that if he just mailed the report, it would get buried in a pile of memos on the president’s desk, Sachs instead C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T 39 stood in front of his desk and read a summary of Einstein’s letter aloud. That got Roosevelt’s attention, and he quickly initiated a project to both stop what the Nazis were doing and create an atomic bomb for the United States.∂∂ Like Sachs, good proponents know the wisdom of face-to-face communication. They meet with people rather than send e-mails and letters.∂∑ As Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, says, ‘‘I like to see people face-to-face even if it means traveling halfway around the world. You can read, you can study, but to see people and circumstances, it’s a motivator.’’∂∏ Ideas can get lost in mounds of papers and ﬂurries of e-mails, but people are more cooperative and far more likely to commit to working together on issues when they meet in a group.∂π People trust you more when they converse with you in person. You can’t shake a hand over the phone; you can’t see nods of agreement and looks of confusion using e-mail. One important reason for preferring face-to-face exchanges for advocacy is that it is much harder for decision makers to reject people and their ideas when meeting them in the ﬂesh. This is why experienced salespeople willingly travel thousands of miles for brief meetings with potential clients. Customers can ignore e-mails, and they can put off decisions over the phone, but saying no to someone sitting in front of you is harder to do. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, after reading a proposal for a large investment in Thailand, turned to his wife and said: ‘‘Look at this deal here. This guy, this nut, wants us to invest $1 billion in autos. I’m going to blow him out of the water tomorrow. I mean, this guy’s got no chance.’’ The next day, the man with the proposal, Mark Norbom, head of GE Capital’s ofﬁce in Thailand, walked into the board meeting and in forty-ﬁve minutes turned both Welch and the board into supporters. ‘‘So we bet on it,’’ says Welch. ‘‘What it was is this guy ﬂying over from Bangkok, and he was in there, and he was making the case.... We were convinced. If you asked me ﬁve minutes before the meeting, I’d say ‘Get out of here. What are you, nuts?’ And yet he made a great case, and you love him for doing it.’’∂∫ Norbom understood how important face-to-face communication was when selling ideas. Distance does not make the heart grow fonder. So what do you do if you can’t meet face-to-face? First, use all of the techniques discussed in this book when composing memos and e-mails and when preparing for teleconferences. Second, use the richest media you can. New video-conferencing systems like HALO mimic face-to-face interactions far better than a phone call or e-mail because feedback is immediate. Third, know the communication culture of the organization’s decision 40 C O M M U N I C AT E YO U R I D E A W I T H I M PA C T makers and use their preferred media. Some companies still rely on face-toface meetings for important decisions, others use text messages intensively, and others prefer written documents. Don’t pitch your idea by e-mail if the ﬁrm has a phone culture—it won’t get the attention it deserves. Watch the Jargon Advocates understand that using appropriate language legitimizes their efforts to champion ideas. If you use words that signal to decision makers that you are deeply conversant with the issue you are pitching and with the way decision makers think, you enhance your credibility. Words show people whether or not you belong to the club. A person championing a technology solution before a highly technical audience should use appropriate technical terminology. Talking to a group of lawyers may require different language choices about the same solution. Staffers in the federal government may pitch an idea by saying, ‘‘OMB wants us to coordinate this proposal with both DOJ and DOD. The project will be led by a couple of SESs’’ (translation: The Ofﬁce of Management and Budget [at the White House] wants us to coordinate this proposal with the Justice Department and the Defense Department. The project will be led by some senior government executives [Senior Executive Service personnel]). In the military, an ofﬁcer may say, ‘‘We are going to staff the proposed project with a couple of O-6s brought in from CENTCOM’’ (translation: The staff will be a couple of colonels from Central Comma

Advocacy: Championing Ideas and Influencing Others

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue