CHAPTER 10

OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS

Ever since I read Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift, where one of the chapters is about a Silicon Valley programmer who preferred to work without clothes on, I have wanted to include a story about a naked guy. Why? I guess it’s just because in most business books you assume people are wearing something, usually a suit.

So here’s the story about the deaf guy in the sauna. I was sitting in the sauna, a Nordic tradition, at a ski resort in the north of Sweden, after a day of cross-country skiing. I had gone up there to train for a long-distance race later in the season, the Marcialonga in Italy. An older guy enters the sauna, naked, as I am. He begins to talk in a rather loud voice and it soon becomes clear that he is deaf. I tell him (by talking a little louder and by making sure he can read my lips) that I’m in town for cross-country skiing.

He then goes on to tell me how much he enjoys skiing but he has not been able to ski for many years because of injuries, including a lost finger. He is obviously sad that he cannot engage in sports the way he used to, on doctor’s orders. I would like to tell him that he shouldn’t listen too much to doctors, but I resist the temptation to give unsolicited advice. So I continue to listen and finally tell him what I feel – that he seems to be a pretty healthy guy to me. He tells me he’s 61.

He then asks how old I am, and guesses that I am 35–40 years old. The lighting must have been pretty dim in that sauna. I tell him my age. He goes: ‘Wow, astonishing!’ Now, I’m in pretty good shape since I work out regularly, but his surprise still seemed slightly excessive. I later understood that he had misheard me as saying that I was 76 years old. I then set a new target for how to look when I’m really 76.

You have to change your communication depending on the context, for example when you speak with a deaf guy in a sauna. You have to check that you are really understood. If you suspect miscommunication, follow up on it. Among other lessons from the story, communication is difficult. This chapter is about how to get your message across. Communication is at the core of leadership.

#092 Outside-In Perspective (OIP)

See things through the eyes of others.

When you run a business on the Internet, like an e-commerce website, you are forced to view your company from the perspective of the customer. The only thing they ever see of you is the web page or app on their screen. To ‘think web’ is to see things from the outside looking in. When I launched my first web company, Fondex (the Scandinavian online fund supermarket), we had a big sign on the wall in the office saying, ‘Think Web!’ You are in an extreme business when the main interface you have with your clients is just a screen. Everything gets amplified. Every link and button must be self-explanatory, there can be no spelling errors and the site or app must work perfectly. You have to see the world from the user’s perspective, from the outside.

Walking into a branch of your bank, everything is much more obvious: there is an entrance door, there is a front desk, there are people working and there is a queue where you can wait. You will instantly orientate yourself without having to think about it. Websites, apps and software should be just like that, as Steve Krug says in his classic, Don’t Make Me Think. This quick and intuitive process is ‘System 1 thinking’, as described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. An example is driving a car, when you know how to drive – you just drive. ‘System 2 thinking’, meanwhile, is the contemplative reasoning you adopt when you are trying to figure something out – for example when you arrive at a new website. How does this work? Where do I click? What happens next?

When you work at an organization you naturally view the world from the inside looking out, while the rest of the population on the planet not working at this company will look at it from the outside. Some of that outside population will be your customers or service users and you will need to adopt their perspective in order to succeed.

Imagine Amazon, a huge online retailer with revenue of US$50 billion in 2011, data centres and warehouses all over the world, and complex physical infrastructure logistics and distribution. The only thing you ever see when shopping at Amazon.com is a web page (or an app if you use your phone) and the parcel when it arrives. But behind that computer screen is a giant operation that is the everyday workplace for more than 43,000 employees around the world. The company’s success is based on the fact that it is looking at the company from the perspective of over 140 million active customers and constantly thinking about how to provide great customer experience.

It’s easy to become terribly near-sighted in the organization where you work, and to assume that the rest of the world sees things your way. Instead you must assume that nobody understands, or even cares, what you do. With an outside-in mindset you constantly ask questions like, ‘Is this simple enough?’, ‘What kind of experience does the customer get?’, ‘Do we deliver delight?’, ‘Is it clear how we provide value?’

One of the best things a business-person can do is to explain in a simple way what he does for a living. The same goes for any politician, scientist, academic, lawyer or carpenter who works with something that might not be crystal clear to someone else.

For ten years I was the chairman of a non-profit organization I founded in Sweden called Transfer. The purpose of Transfer is to bring speakers from the business world (or any working life) to schools and speak about what they do. There is a huge demand in schools to understand things ranging from marketing and law to entrepreneurship and how to start a company. The idea behind Transfer was to ‘transfer’ knowledge from one group (people with working experience) to another group (schools and students), thereby creating an intellectual infrastructure that did not exist before on a larger scale. Transfer became Sweden’s largest speaker bureau, providing speakers for free to schools. The value for the schools and the students was obvious, but there was also great value for the speakers. Highly skilled people shifted from the comfort zone of the workplace with a common understanding based on a shared terminology and knowledge about how things work, to a classroom in the suburbs and students with a completely different frame of reference. Being forced to articulate what you do, for a group of people with very limited understanding of your business, was for many speakers both a welcome experience and a frightening one. It helped the knowledge worker to think in new ways about their work through describing it in a simple and inspiring way. Realize that speaking to a teenager about your job is not much different from talking to the average customer.

Even if your audience is not a classroom full of students, it helps to imagine they are. If, for example, a meteorologist was to describe their work to me, the presentation would benefit from seeing me as a totally ignorant 16 year old with no knowledge of how the weather works.

Everything is complex in its own ways. View yourself and what you do from the outside and assume that the rest of the world will have very limited patience with understanding you.

#093 Reduce The Noise (RTN)

In personal communication, stick to the issue, and see the non-issues.

Has it ever happened that you are discussing a particular issue with a colleague, but it seems like the conversation is about something else entirely? Consider this dialogue:

‘Hi, Johnny,’ you say cheerfully. ‘Can you please help me with this report?’

‘No, why don’t you do it yourself?’ Johnny replies coldly.

Here you have layers of sub-context. The task at hand is about getting a report done, but the issue seems to be something very different here. The task will not get done because there is something else in the air, ‘noise’. What is this noise? Johnny may be fed up with you because you always get him to do your work for you. Or you were promoted over him and he feels his career has stalled. Did you treat Johnny badly at some stage and this is his revenge? Or is he tired? Problems at home? Or is it simply because he has no time? Whatever the case, there are circumstances that make it hard for you to discuss the actual task (the report) – things are in the way, noise that disturbs the atmosphere. Communication does not work.

As a leader you should try to identify this noise, listen ‘beneath the surface’ and understand what is going on. If Johnny refuses to help you with a task, and he is supposed to because he is on your team and because it is general courtesy to help each other, you should immediately focus on the ‘noise’.

Noise might sound as if it is something ‘bad’, like irrelevant feelings that get in the way of the job you want to be done, but it is really something quite important. The noise tells you what is really going on. If, by identifying noise, you realize that your colleague is angry with you, that is now the real challenge, not the report you needed help with: to sit down and talk about your colleague’s negative feelings. If you sort it out, you have reduced the noise and can get back to the work. To ‘reduce the noise’ is not to treat feelings and other aspects of being human as obstacles, but to listen to what’s in the air and give it attention. Too much noise can really be a threat to the workings of any company; in anything you do, decide or plan there will then be a ‘communication distortion field’ blurring relations. I have seen management teams where there is so much noise (anger, disappointment, frustration, insecurity, paranoia, revenge) that it becomes impossible to get things done. Everything is infected. You then need to reduce the noise, by giving it attention. (See also Focus On Operations #091 FOO.)

#094 Stick To Three (STT)

Not everything can be equally important.

When communicating what’s important to the organization, make it simple:

• Have only a few major things, or preferably just one
• Make sure the few things are simple to understand
• Don’t change the major things every week
• Repeat them as often as you can
• Notice when the few major things are not respected or ignored

In my humble opinion, a few means a maximum of three major things (even if the bullet list above actually contains five points), defined on either the company level or on your personal level. Three major things are about all I can keep in my head anyway. The same goes for the number of bullets on a PowerPoint slide, if you need to use a slide at all to get your message across. In any case, stick to three. Maximum.

#095 Beware Of Sharkfins (BOS)

Setting targets that you can achieve – or aspire to?

Your major thing can be something you want to achieve, a goal. If your target is to break even this year or achieve a billion-dollar revenue next year, that might be the major thing for you and your company. Or to reach the goal that your ski club wins the regional championships, or to spread laughter in the most disastrous places on earth, as the non-profit organization Clowns Without Borders does.

Now, the next question is, should you set big, audacious goals – or realistic ones? There are two schools of thought here. One thinks that challenging visionary goals is inspiring, while the other believes that realistic goals are better because you can actually reach them, and the people you work with will believe in them if they are possible. Your preference will probably depend on whether you are an entrepreneur (inspired by visionary goals and good at communicating them) or a manager (happier with realistic goals that can be achieved). The difference can be striking.

At Keybroker, we first had audacious, aggressive goals with a revenue forecast curve that went straight to heaven, driven by new venture capital. We then changed the budget for the next year to a more realistic one, and the resulting line that we tracked our results against looked like a shark fin – first a strong upward curve and then a sharp drop (when the forecast was revised). We adopted the expression ‘Beware of Sharkfins’. It can be inspiring to communicate grand ideas and visions, but if you never reach them or have to revise your goals, the inspiration can quickly turn into despair and disillusionment instead.

Imagine that you are raising funds for a charitable cause. You have set goals for how much you and your team are going to raise each month. At the beginning of each month your group meets to follow up on the previous month’s results. Since you are the leader of the pack, you are the one making the presentation. Now, when communicating your targets and the outcomes, should you compare them with the past (and see them in terms of growth: wow, this month we raised more than last!) or the future (in terms of budget: in a few months’ time our goal is to raise twice as much)?

Communicating your progress in a historic perspective is useful, especially if you are growing and can inspire your team by showing how you have improved since the last period. Communicating future targets is better if you want to point to where you are going and spend less time on where you have been – to create a shared goal. A note of caution, though: if your future plan is very ambitious with aggressive monthly targets, it can look like a tiresome uphill journey. A steep hill is great to look back on once you have climbed it, but it can be demotivating when you are still at the bottom.

Dag Hammarskjold was a Swedish diplomat, economist, author and the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, serving from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. In his book Markings (Vägmärken) he concludes:

‘Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.’

#096 Over-Communicate & Repeat (OCR)

You can never be too clear or repeat too often.

You should always ‘over-communicate’ the messages that you want to stick. It is a very common problem that things get under-communicated. It is not enough to say it once, if it matters, but several times, and every day if possible. The reason is that what is clear in your mind probably looks very different in somebody else’s mind. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that what is in your head also is in other people’s heads.

In an organization, never take for granted that everyone:

• Shares your view of a decision you have taken
• Is working towards the same targets
• Sees the vision and the mission of the company in the same way
• Understands the plan that you have worked out together
• Shares the purpose of a project you run
• Is executing the same strategy
• Has interpreted the details like you do
• Has the same time frame
• Views the Formal Leader as the real leader

The reality is that there is a high probability that no one has the same view of anything. If you want to be clear about the decision to shut down a country office, for example, or recruit a marketing manager or launch a new organization, or start the new project – be sure to repeat it often and check that you have the people with you. It is not only that people just hear what they want to hear or forget, it’s because communication easily gets lost. When you think you are communicating and repeating way too much, you are still not doing it enough. Keep communicating, but balance your talking with the importance of listening in leadership (see Listen Without Commenting #030 LWC and Lead By Questions #042 LBQ).

#097 Show Whole Picture (SWP)

Seeing the whole makes the parts more motivating.

I’m a strong believer in being transparent about as much as possible in an organization. If you can show the whole picture – results, plans and strategies, as well as failures, mistakes and painful truths – it is more likely that people will feel more involved and motivated. If you want to make people think like leaders, it is absolutely necessary to show the whole picture. If people are to be able to be proactive and take initiatives, they need to see the bigger picture, not only their own part.

A useful forum for showing the whole picture is the monthly meeting, if you have one, which is ideal for sharing the latest results. Growing numbers and profits are good for the spirit in a company, of course. What do you do when numbers are bad, growth slow and no profits? Well, you have to show that, too. If you have an organization where everyone is a leader, chances are that people will come up with initiatives to fix the bad numbers. Of course, different leaders will have different forums. The head teacher will summon the students and their parents to the school auditorium to let everybody in on the new plans, and the preacher will call his parish to the church to show God’s bigger picture.

#098 No PowerPoint (NPP)

Make it personal.

When I did actor training, taking lessons from a theatre director to be a more efficient communicator, I learned that one of the most dramatic things you can do is to enter a stage and do nothing, just stand there. The effect is overwhelming. Then, when you finally start speaking after a few seconds (that will feel like an eternity, especially for you), the audience is yours.

From this minimalist perspective, you would be reluctant to add any unnecessary components that get in the way between you and your message. Still, most presentations start with a massive attack of slides, killing the audience with information overload before you have barely begun.

Before making a presentation you should ask yourself: ‘What is the bare minimum of presentation tools I need to support my message? Do I need presentation software and slides to get my message across?’

Imagine Winston Churchill using a slide presentation to communicate his message with bullet points:

To think ‘no PowerPoint’, as in the popular presentation software, is to not let technology and tools get between your message and your audience. If you are to communicate the monthly income statement or the growth of smartphones in the last five years, sure, showing a PowerPoint slide with a graph can be useful. But if you want to inspire your organization, say it from the heart!

And if you are doing a demo – for example, showcasing an app, or role-playing a sales meeting – then you should never, ever consider using any slides. Show by doing!

#099 Things On Wall (TOW)

In sight – in mind.

The saying goes: ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ The proactive use of that insight is: ‘In sight – in mind.’ So, how do you keep something in sight? It’s easy – you put it on the wall, about the average height of the eyes. I’m a great fan of putting things on the wall, not to the point where walls get cluttered with information but as a way of highlighting the few major things that are important at any given point.

At one of my companies, the online mutual fund supermarket, the goal was to add all the mutual fund products in the market. Consequently, we had a big ‘thermometer’ on the wall with the temperature rising as we approached the goal. In another company the goal was to achieve a certain number of a particular type of customer, and we put up a simple scoreboard with the results stuck up on sticky notes. In most systems developments departments, there are boards showing the progress of various software projects. You can also have displays showing real-time information such as sales results and order volumes. At home, you might stick a scoreboard on the refrigerator, awarding points to your children that can lead to earning a prize or treat for the achievement of various household chores. A non-profit organization might track the number of free lectures delivered to schools, as we did at my charity, and highlight the number as a ticker on the website, which can also serve as a ‘wall’.

The point is that if you put it up somewhere public, in the environment where your team spends most of their time, it will be noticed. In most organizations, all the information you need exists in one way or another. The problem is that it is not accessible, understandable, shared or prioritized. It just sits there in databases, on individual computers or in binders. If there are a few major things that you think everybody should think about, make those things visible by putting them on the wall – ideally supported by evolving data.

To put things on the wall is about:

• Being transparent
• Visualizing what can be visualized – bring information to the surface
• Giving access to data – it means more if the information is shared
• Inspiring the whole organization by creating entertaining graphics
• Highlighting a few major things so they are remembered

#100 Omit Needless Words (ONW)

Say it economically, so your message gets through.

Communicate at the most economical level, not using more than enough to get your message across. You can often reduce up to 50% of the words in a text, without reducing the essence of what you want to say. That is to communicate economically. And be careful when using the abundance of digital tools at your disposal (words, images, text, slides, boxes and arrows, illustrations, etc.) since they risk being obstacles to what you want to say. The communication gets in the way of the message.

William Strunk Jr and E.B. White introduced the concept of omitting needless words in their classic Elements of Style, a book on good writing, originally published in 1918. Carry this timeless advice with you in all your communication. How can you say what you want to say in the most efficient way? The point is not to be economical in a financial sense, because there are endless free resources at your disposal. After all, it does not cost you anything, except time, to add ten more PowerPoint slides. No, the advantage to omitting needless words is to communicate with more impact. If you can distill what you want to say into three Major Things, and present it standing, using just your own words and maybe your fingers (one, two, three), it is so much better than consuming your audience’s attention with ten slides packed with images, boxes and text. The idea with omitting needless words is to say what you want to say, without polluting your presentation with too much stuff, so that people will understand and remember what you just said, the useful and needed words. A final note: the most efficient way to communicate can be to use no words at all. The best leadership communication advice? Just smile!

Communication, discussion and dialogue are at the heart of human activity. We would have a hard time surviving without them. They are also the backbone of any business and organization. They are at the core of leadership. If you believe by now that we are all leaders, that we should be and could be, then inspire people to communicate. Let your colleagues talk, give the stage to people, help make presentations more efficient and give constructive feedback. Communications skills and experience also give people self-confidence to enter the scene and speak up, take charge. That is how communication relates to the all-leadership vision of this book, and essentially what you as a leader – supporting others to be leaders – want to do: inspire to step forward to lead.