In this age of faster, faster, faster, how do you explain baseball, and all those spectators watching -- for two-and-a-half hours?
Perhaps even more surprising, how do you explain 300 people listening to a speaker on a stage for two hours, without averting their eyes?
Now explore that further, and study the faces of those people. They look completely engaged and utterly content.
Why?
Because people so rarely experience these moments of single focus on a simple thing, and that feeling -- our zen-like moment of connection to one thing -- delights them.
Consider our constant alternative: enduring the siege of words and images. Watch CNN financial news, for example. A dark-suited anchor person is talking -- fairly quickly. Meanwhile, words like "Dow drops on IBM earnings report" race across the bottom of the screen. At the top of your screen, abbreviations and numbers race by, too, showing the up-to-that-second prices of the most active stocks. You spot the time in the upper right hand corner, the temperature in the left, and sometimes a list of upcoming stories on the right -- viewing as multitasking.
Meanwhile, you're scanning your local newspaper and checking your voice mails, while Norah Jones sings in the background and your daughter croons in the foreground, "Can you play with me now?"
After you're done, go check golf on the CBS website. On just the portion of that site that fits your screen, there are 59 different links you can hit. If you want to check the scores for the Masters, you notice there are at least two links to "scoreboard" -- is one scoreboard perhaps more detailed than the other? Maybe there's some good information on one of those links. But how can you know, or even know you've noticed all the links that might interest you?
Welcome to the Age of Way Too Much.
And what is the almost inevitable result of too much information screaming for our attention?
But of course. When did you first hear of attention deficit disorder -- and why was it not more than 15 years ago? Was there no ADD in 1980? Or was it just not an epidemic yet?
What caused the epidemic? Did our species suddenly start selecting for a gene that predisposes humans to deficient attention? Or did the world change, and the cascades of images and words so overwhelm so many that ADD became not just a diagnosis, but a description of our culture?
In a world of people who cannot concentrate, how do you get and keep their attention?
Ask baseball, and then ask the speaker. They have three critical things in common.
The first is pace; rather than the adagio pace of modern life, baseball and the speaker move more at the rhythm of a lullaby. As the term implies, each "lulls" you into attention.
The game and the speaker are simple. The pitcher throws, the batter swings; just follow the ball and you can follow the game. The speaker reduces his images to one (himself) and no more than one additional one -- a phone, an orange, a chair used as a prop. You don't need to work to focus your attention; it's clear where to put it. You are blissfully, delightfully undistracted.
The game and the speaker manage to compel the attention of their audiences, and the audience's reaction isn't "Can you speed this up?" Unsaid, their words, expressed from the content that their faces and entire bodies convey, are "Thanks!"
And finally, each is a story. Baseball, in fact, is a collection of them. Can Jaret return from that painful surgery? Can the Cardinals overcome the death of their young relief pitcher? Can Dave endure whatever has thrown him into his 0-for-21 slump? Will the new kid from up north finally achieve his dreams, and ours for him?
The skilled speaker does not speak, but weave -- a collection of stories whose context makes us understand. The ordinary speaker describes or explains, but the spellbinder demonstrates, with stories -- and we sit, riveted, as human beings always have in the presence of stories, well-told.
Slow it down, make it simple, weave a story. All of that will help you cut through the clutter, so much of which is of our own making.
Suggested New Name: Upchuck
A well-known client and friend (have to protect his name here, sorry) recently wrote pleading with me to pan Epcot, hoping that someone at Disney might be reading, and might respond either by reviving Epcot or shutting off the respirator and letting it flatline.
While it's actually only 24 years old, and was designed to be just what its acronym suggests -- an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow -- Epcot somehow manages to seem decades older than Seattle's Space Needle, which actually is twice as old. Epcot's point of difference, it would seem, is its massive size. At 300 acres, the park leads many people to decide that the letters must stand for Every Person Comes Out Tired.
"Tired" -- it's the perfect word. Epcot looks so tired it makes one yawn. There is irony here, of course, that something designed to look like 2010 looks like 1950 -- irony, and then something revealing. Epcot strongly resembles another hopelessly antiquated-looking building, the Encounter Restaurant at Los Angeles airport. With its George Jetson-inspired design (a diner is tempted to ask "Where's Astro?"), curves and orbs and splotches of purple, the Encounter offers diners huge helpings of "What Were They Thinking?"
And like Epcot, the restaurant reminds us that nothing is more blurred than foresight. Where are the helicopters than were going to transport us to our work pods every day? Why are we still stuck on the ground, when the vision of the future was in the air, best symbolized by another Disney creation, the "space-age" Monorail?
Why was this common vision of the future so utterly, almost totally, wrong?
Regardless of the answers, Disney must act. It's time they ask about Epcot "What would Walt do?" Because Walt wouldn't yawn; he'd scream.
Where have all the ideas gone?
We constantly see purported new ideas, including that memorable 2005 Harvard Business Review we cited last year, which touted no fewer than 20 "Breakthrough Ideas" for the coming year. Here was one of the Big Ideas, "The Velcro Organization" -- a title that by itself makes you suspicious of what follows.
"When your customers are worldwide, you need to know the people and relationships that work in each locale."
Whoa!
Breakthrough idea number 17 was allowing mid-career sabbaticals to workers, an idea that broke through and then collapsed two decades ago. And then, comically unaware of the irony, the editors offered Big Idea #20:
"Be skeptical of anything touted as 'new.'"
To which we all should reply: Exactly.
Bold New Ideas appeal to us. We humans crave novelty, and we want to think that life gets better. Big New Ideas appeal to our desire for both.
But are they big new ideas?
Is it possible there is as much business wisdom in Machiavelli's The Prince and Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier as in all this decade's business books -- including mine -- combined?
How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People have sold 26 million copies. Did they cover anything that that Shakespeare missed, centuries earlier?
What happened to Reengineering? To Excellence? To core competencies, customer intimacy, one-to-one futures, fifth disciplines?
Isn't a Tipping Point a keen observation, and strategically useless?
High Tech and High Touch? Clever wordsmithing, and a reminder that a clever expression can put critical thinking on hold for years.
We forget, or fail to learn, so we mistake old ideas for new ones. As a favorite Stanford professor has pointed out, take incentive-based pay for teachers, today's Big Idea. Today's? It's a century-old idea that gets thrown out roughly every 10-15 years, for a simple reason:
It does not work and never has.
The same new things get discovered every decade, but are cleverly relabeled so few people recognize them. It's the same old wine, in new bottles.
At this point, a reader might say, "I agree, there's not much new -- but so what?" The consequence, however, is that the endless search for the Next Big Idea has distracted us from the Old Ideas. One Big Idea sounds so much more exciting, not to mention easier to address -- being that it's just one thing.
And so businesses try to learn trick plays, when we should be mastering blocking and tackling -- blocking and tackling ideas like courage, openness, humility, empathy. candor, and perhaps the greatest force multiplier of all, passion.
A leader of an organization we advise walked into his first meeting and announced that what was needed was not one bold initiative. "Sometimes, what is really needed is a dozen tiny things."
Business hasn't mastered the little things. Almost none of us are blocking and tackling. And customers are the victims when our packages don't get there, the order gets confused, the latte turns into a hot chocolate. These companies don't need reengineering, customer intimacy, one-to-one futures or Blue Oceans; these companies have heard so much jargon that every bold new initiative is viewed as this year's Idea Du Jour.
Businesses don't need the IDJ. They need a DLT -- a Dozen Little Things, the blocking and tackling.
The Next Big Idea is A Dozen Little Ones.
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Harry Beckwith is the Director of Beckwith Partners, an internationally regarded branding
and marketing firm. His classic trilogy on marketing a service -- Selling the Invisible,
The Invisible Touch, and What Clients Love -- has sold over 900,000 copies
in 22 translations, and the first book has been named one of the ten best business and
management books of all time. He has been a keynote speaker for 14 Fortune 200 annual sales meetings and the National Speakers' Association convention, and has made presentations in Europe, South America and Asia. He is cited regularly in |
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national media including CNN,
The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Entrepreneur,
Crain's New York Business and numerous
American, European and Asian newspapers. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, Harry resides in Minneapolis with his wife Christine Clifford Beckwith. He is the father of six children. Beckwith Partners' clients include Wells Fargo, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft and Target as well as many venture-capitalized startups worldwide. |
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