As a consultant/contractor, the ‘V’ word has become one of those little “triggers” that puts me into a wary state. When someone utters the ‘V’ word — especially if they’re using it to describe me – all sorts of silent alarm bells go off in my mind. This happens especially when the person uses the ‘V’ word when we’re discussing or negotiating the terms or scope of my services.

The ‘V’ word started out as an innocent term describing a standard element in the anatomy of commercial relationships.

‘V’ is for “vendor,” and that’s good enough for me… well…  it is, but only sometimes.

Initially, “vendor” was an all-purpose, generic term, as in,  “Let’s examine the typical supply chain between vendors and their customers,”  or “We at MegaRetailMart are inviting all of our vendors to participate in an environmental sustainability conference, to see how we can crush local economies under a reduced carbon footprint.”

Somewhere along the line,  though, as business relationships evolved into ever-more-complex arrangements, there emerged a distinction in common business parlance  between “suppliers” (or even, ”service providers“) versus mere ”vendors.”

The term “vendor” become the preferred term to describe the exchange of a standardized product or service within the context of an arm’s length commercial relationship. The person from whom we buy (or “source”) our computer workstations might be called a “computer hardware vendor,”  but the lawyer we hired to do that deal was not called a “legal vendor.”

This isn’t because lawyers are sensitive human beings (they aren’t) who might require validation from us, their consumers (oops, excuse me, we’d prefer they call us their “customers”  …no, wait, how about ”clients?”  ah yes, we like that better…)… no… it’s because the term ”vendor” signifies someone who is “vending” something (think “vending machine”) and that doesn’t really describe what’s being done by our lawyer. What’s being done by our lawyer is a professional service that is highly customized and multi-faceted… and it often requires that they, our lawyer/advocate/advisor, engage us in a whole lot of collaboration and communication  as a part of their service.

On Beyond Semantics

When hiring someone to do something for us, there’s a whole spectrum of potential words for us to choose from. I think the spectrum looks something like this:

Vendor — Supplier — Provider — Advisor — Partner

With the example of a lawyer, we can see them landing somewhere near the right-end “advisor” zone of the spectrum, or beyond… especially if we’re in one of those organizations that uses the term “partnering”  a lot.

Okay, so we don’t need to hurt the feelings of any “legal professionals” nor the high-paying sensibilities of us “clients.”

Who else do we need to protect from the dreaded ‘V’ word?  Doctors. Clergy. Architects. Engineers. Accountants. Consultants.  Wait… consultants?   Well, apparently, it depends on what kinds of consultants we’re hiring.

Take me and what I do…  am I a “learning consultant” or a “training vendor?”   Depends who you ask… and anyway, what’s the difference?

In my field, the term “training vendor” is sometimes an apt description of what some people do, namely, the delivery of a standardized “off-the-shelf” learning curriculum. One training vendor is as good as the next.  We don’t like our training vendor? Let’s just swap ‘em out with an equivalent vendor.  Vendi, vidi, vichi.

However, in the case of learning (or “talent development”) consulting, where we’re analyzing, designing and delivering something highly customized, the term “training vendor” becomes a (mostly) unintentional pejorative, signifying commoditization of something that is really not a commodity.

I know, they probably didn’t mean to insult anyone… and no insult taken… “vendor” is, in the dictionary at least, a generic term.

Even still, those alarm bells are ringing…

Why?

Well, once that semantic line gets crossed, other lines typically follow: It’s a sad irony that, when a professional services provider gets treated as a “vendor” by their clients, the clients do things that they’d never consider doing to a true commodity supplier.  Here’s a classic video that illustrates this point beautifully:

Anyone who has ever done independant contract work as a designer (web design, graphic design, architectural design. etc.) has lived through that. Design consultants, who enjoy none of the clout of lawyers, get treated as “vendors” (really, more poorly than true “vendors”) all the time.

Some of the worst behavior on this front, unfortunately, may come from people who have been “vendorized” consultants themselves.  They continue the cycle of insult/injury by denigrating the value of what the other party has to offer… a lose-lose negotiaton tactic. Ultimately, they will receive less value for their money spent than they could otherwise get.

Yup, what goes around comes around… and I feel very fortunate to have clients that treat me like a partner…  even if I’m just another one of their “vendors.”  For them, I’ll dispense a few extra cans of fizzy learning goodness.

These old coins — chips that have fallen off your shoulder — have become like so much clutter in the home of your mind.

Clutter — both tangible clutter and emotional clutter (and it’s hard to separate the two, anyway) — acts as an emotional and spiritual black hole, sapping your energy… a black hole from the a collapsed star that once burned too bright.  Clutter is what prevents you from making progress, from improving things and moving forward.

Once you de-clutter, once you get deal with the old stuff that’s taking up your space, your time and your attention, you will be amazed how good you will feel.

Hyper-inflated emotions eventually lose their value.

The golden rule is the gold standard.

Danny Silverman writes,

Success = Ambition * Selling Skills.  

Discuss…

Okay, let’s discuss.  What do you mean, Danny?

I know people with (competency and determination) but they can’t sell it… and so they fail.  That’s my thought of the day.  “Everyone lives by selling something.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

Yes… and..?

For any career, whether you craft violins, collect garbage, write law or heal people, if you can’t sell yourself and your craft, the rest doesn’t matter.

I like this guy, Danny S… and he’s articulating an idea that I have to sell to clients constantly, especially those clients who insist that they ”aren’t salespeople.”

Yes. Yes you are salespeople.  All of you. What’s more, sales is the oldest and most noble professional. Sales is what makes the world go around.

Sales done right, that is.

I try running my flurry of formulas and models by Danny.  There’s the old Skill x Will matrix.  There’s the rogenSi (Knowledge+Skill+Process) x Mindset = Exceptional Performance formula.  Nope, Danny doesn’t want any of that. I don’t bother trying my A.V.O.C.A.D.O. performance model on Danny, or my Competency x Warmth x Intention framework.  Even though he started off with a mathematical formula, Danny is not buying my equations or models today.

Selling ain’t about telling.

Let’s throw away the models and open up the question of how to build-out the components of Danny’s success formula, by making a list of attributes, going from A to Z. (Learning Consultant Jargon version: We can generate an ad hoc sales competency framework using the English alphabet as a convenient brainstorming scaffold.)

Yes Danny, to be successful you have to be able to sell your ideas and your talents…. and to do that, it helps tremendously if you can develop the following:

Ambition

Belief

Confidence

Determination

Experience

…and with that, I and turn the discussion over to the Facebook Peanut Gallery:  What are the attributes of a successful performer?

Here’s some of my other friends had to say:

(ht Lev, Ben, Avi, Aliza… apologizes for partially sanitizing your submissions, especially yours Ben…  hey, this is a somewhat family-friendly operation here…)

Tellingly, by changing one term in this exercise — generalizing competency in “sales” as a “performance” —  it opened up an interesting analogy between sales and the entertainment industry, which of course was unintentional. 

Ultimately, it’s the serendipitous connections that make an exercise like this so valuable.

Various entries were given for each letter…. but what is the X-factor?

Xenophilia, I think…. the embracing of that which is unknown and different, especially the different perspectives you can get if you ask a question to a few friends in an safe learning environment…. yes?

Yes, I just called Facebook a safe learning environment.  For whatever reason, some people open up on Facebook personal status update comment threads in a way that’s different than what you see in blogs, public forums, Twitter, or even email and instant messages. Perhaps the mid-size semi-private conversations on sites like Facebook and Google+ are the Internet’s equivalent of a small group discussion…. not as intimate as a 1:1 conversation and yet not as open as a large group discussion. In terms of places to generate online conversation, a circle of friends-of-friends seems to be a uniquely interesting zone.

Zeroing in on the lesson learned: It’s more interesting and fun to learn/sell when you let other people do the teaching/selling. Thank you Danny and friends for your excellent, LOL (Learning Out Loud) input!

Within a mere seven days this “Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL” video has garnered over 178,000 views — that’s good publicity for an organization that does good work. It’s easy to understand why people like this video… what’s a bit harder to understand is why two of my friends have already tagged me with it (HT DavidC and GilY).  It may mean that my friends know what I do for a living… and/or it may mean they know that I sometimes preface my prefaces with a preface.

What I like about this video, apart from its painfully-true-to-life humor, is its high level of craft in the details.  Not every gag is pointed out, not every joke verbalized… it invites you to take a closer look and discover things on your own… and that’s exactly what makes for a good presentation.  Am I over-thinking it? Sure, why not. The video wins because it calls out the bad behavior without modeling it.

Looking for something simpler but also funny?  (Oh you weren’t? Well here it is anyway.)  Here’s a classic bit by Don McMillan called “Life After Death by PowerPoint:”

The investor took a stick and drew a number into sand on the ground – the sand had concentric circle ripples in it like a Zen garden — and the number he drew was 295. He said “$295 million.” My partner was getting very excited and I was starting to get anxious:  What about my new career?  What about my Masters degree? How could I take this venture back on?  I didn’t really want to go back to doing the dot com thing… but then, $295 million is a whole lot of money…

I asked the investor if the 295  was the pre-money valuation or the post-money valuation and I immediately sensed that the investor was annoyed with my question and analytical tone of voice. Just like they used be in the old days.  I wanted to change my question to something better but — and here the dream started to crumble away as I was waking up — I realized that in addition to the expense of re-purchasing the business and its key assets, the $295 million of value would be mostly divided up between the lead investor and my former business partner… the $295 million was not for me, it was for themselves… and I had no interest in being partners with them, especially as a minority shareholder. My anxiety lifted away as I realized how easy it would be to say “no” to them… and how unrealistic this dream was.

I sat up, removed my sweat-soaked t-shirt,  lay back down again and relaxed.

“How far you go in life

depends on your being

tender with the young,

compassionate with the aged,

sympathetic with the striving

and tolerant of the weak and strong.

Because someday in life

you will have been

all of these.”

- George Washington Carver

Ah yes… where journalism and seasonal linkbait collide.

Obligatory weight/health/fitness/diet-related graphic for seasonally appropriate blog entry. (NOTE: Unless the clipart person is less than 5 feet tall and/or unless the scale units are metric (kilos) and not pounds, this clipart person is probably not overweight... oh wait, is this one of those wrap-around scale dials?)

Ok, I’ll bite.

Yes, it’s now that time of year where all the non-regulars (irregulars?) are at the gym, working their way through their 30 day free trial memberships… and where the impoverished news media posts inane articles about weight loss, diet and exercise.

The question seen a few weeks ago, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”  is now replaced by “How can you stick to your New Year’s resolution?”  ..and will soon be replaced by “Who is advertising at the SuperBowl this year?”  So let’s hold onto this moment… let’s see what we can do right now, to keep our resolve to do whatever it was we said we’d do.

(NOTE: Although I have a resolution to blog more often, in the 3-4 times that I’ve sat down to finish up this particular post I’ve found myself heading out to the gym instead.  Apparently, the irony of sitting down to write about fitness was too much for my mind to handle.) 

Let’s summarize the “breakthrough aha-news”  findings in the aforementioned article on maintaining weight loss, J. Graham Thomas’ Seven Habits of Successful Weight Loss Maintainers…. and perhaps we can uncover a larger pattern and wider meaning:

1. Work out 30 minutes a day
2. Limit TV watching
3. Limit caloric intake
4. Maintain consistency
5. Eat breakfast
6. Avoid emotional eating
7. Monitor yourself

I’ll rebrand these Seven Habits for Highly Effective Living in a Society of Abundant Decadence, where success comes from what you don’t do and what you don’t have. Three of the above items (#2, 3 & 6 )are “negative commandments” and four of them (#1, 4, 5 & 7)  are “positive commandments” designed to help replace bad habits with good habits. #7 is also a bit of a meta-discipline… the part that keeps all the other pieces in check.

To boil it down a bit further:  Replacing bad habits with good habits is about frequent implementation of slight behavioral changes.

Which leads us to some questions: How slight can the behavioral change be? How frequently does one need to implement it? For how long?  Finally, when is the best time to begin implementing a new habit?

How Slight?

The behavioral change can be as slight as a person wants… but just enough to establish a new pattern, to start replacing old habits.  A habit is like a rut in the road… a self-reinforcing behavioral trough.  So to overcome a bad habit, you have to steer down to a new path.

Item #1 in the above-mentioned list has some well-validated research behind it. Here is the concept presented a somewhat addictive video:

One of the main advantages of implementing a slight change (vs. a more radical or systematic change) is the likelihood that it will get done… and just getting it done seems to be the main obstacle for most resolutions. However, to follow from the rut-in-the-road analogy, sometimes a bad habit is so deep that the only way out is by taking a radical new course.

Determining the depth of a habit comes down to understanding what triggers the habit — these are sometimes called behavioral anchors — and gauging how pervasive or irresistible the anchors are.  A behavioral anchor can be anything — it could be a word, a sight, a sound, a sensation, a smell, a person, a thought, a situation, a chemical reward system within the brain. When a person decides to replace one habit with another, their strategy should take into account the existing behavioral anchors and seek to establish newer, more salient anchors.

Once a person knows the change they’re looking to implement, they can start.

How Frequently?

The unit of measure of frequency for most positive-habit-building advice seems to be a 24 hour period.

For many habits, weekly is too weakly…. but there are some positive habits that can be implemented using a 7 day period of frequency. Think of those ingrained weekend habits you have and how it messes with your mind when there’s a holiday or long weekend.

Fewer still are the habits that are anchored to a bi-weekly or monthly schedule…. and as for bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annual cycles, I don’t consider those as being timeframes for “habits” as much as being timeframes for “traditions,” “milestones,” or “scheduled activities” which aren’t quite automatic behaviors… mind you, the changing of seasons can serve as powerful behavioral anchors, too.

So yes, it’s possible to build a “habit” over any timeframe… but to build a new habit, you’re probably going to want to start within a frequency of hours or days, the latter being in the single digits.

For How Long?

There is a popular myth about the “21 Day Rule” i.e. that if you do something at least once per day for three weeks, the behavior will become automatic.  This is supposedly based on the time that it takes for neural connections to become permanent in a person’s brain, a theory devised by a plastic surgeon who dealt with amputees.   There is no credible research to support this claim, and intuitively we know that some habits take longer to form than others.

If a person is lucky (or if they’ve set it up right), a new positive habit can push all kinds of brain triggers after a very small number of repetitions.  On the other end of the spectrum, it may take months or years of concentrated power of will to realign their habits onto a new pathway.

A study done in 2009 found a range of 18 to 254 days as the time it took to members of a sample population to establish a set of pre-selected “good habits,”  with an overall average of 66 days for all the different habits measured.

As they say very quickly at the end of TV and radio commercials:  Actual habits may vary.

So no easy answers here… I’d say just do it once… and keeping “doing it once” until it becomes a habit.

Which brings us to the final question…

When to Start?

Make a calendar appointment, blocking out the time required to execute the new habit, starting in the next 24 hours.

Better yet, start now.

(HT GYehuda)

re:

“I am”
———–
whelmed

Sum it up

According to WordPress, enough people visited this blog this year to fill up Madison Square Garden three times… but most of them did not come to read about filling Yankee Stadium… rather, they were interested in the very large number of people pairings that exist in the world.

Here are this blog’s Top 10 visited pages in 2011, starting with the most popular…

..and here are the Top 10 visited pages of all time…

I’m glad that the “Metaphors are like, everywhere“ post has been scoring well over the longer term…. it’s one of my favorites for a bunch of reasons… but then, if the people want stamps, statistics and steaks, well then, let them eat steak…

(I expect the Forever Stamp investment value analysis to continue to trail off in popularity, especially as the USPS continues to shrink the scope of its First Class service… hmmm… if what I’m looking for is site traffic, perhaps I should find a new alternative investment vehicle to analyze…  perhaps a depreciation table for Apple products? How much will your iPod/iPad/iPhone be worth in 12 months?  Compared to the standard GAAP straight-line depreciation schedule for computer equipment? Tempting… tempting…)

Moving in the realm of things I can control/influence more directly….

Clean it up

There are 40+ comments awaiting moderation, most of them spam filter refugees consisting of statements such as this:

I honey your stories very much because they are written in an understandable perspicuous. So I can read them although I come from Austria and get some problems to interpret English stories.

I’ve got to do a better job staying on top of the comments and giving thoughtful replies to those who bother to do the same… and purging the spam/cruft as it accumulates.

Okay, done. Only 3 of those were real comments awaiting approval/reply.

There are 90+ draft posts, some of which will never, ever, see the light of day…posts such as…

Energy Drinks are the Young Man’s Bottled Water

Well, maybe I will get around to it, as there are some topics (Green Style, Uncommon Comestibles) that I haven’t touched as often as I would like. A friend commented on how this blog has become more focused on topics related to my profession (learning, business performance and personal effectiveness). Those who know me know that I consider that trend both a good thing and a not-so-good thing.

There are also some nearly-complete drafts… in some cases, literally just 1 or 2 key strokes shy of publication.   Hey, why am I writing about writing?  I’ll just wrap up one of those posts right here, right now.

There.  Allow me to present a relic from the pre-Meme Menagerie era:  “Myers-Briggs is so EXPIRED  (or, why this blog is called “INTPraneur’s Outpost”). 

Amazingly enough, I didn’t have to edit or add a single word in that post… I guess I was shy about making it public since I (fortunately) decided against adopting that blog title… and probably just as soon as I finished typing the post. It sits right next to a similar early-stage entry,  How to Name Your Blog which in turn got superceded by Blog Title Revision.

Pick it up

Lastly, WordPress tells me that I posted 47 times this year, not including this one.  This means I did not reach my post-atleast-once-per-week goal, never mind a higher goal.  How did this happen?  Ah, I see why… the month of May was a bit of a black hole…  final projects for school, a ton of travel for work and a very demanding, thankless client project (both the client and the project were thankless and demanding)… which yielded the Plate Too Full post on June 1st… okay, I just re-red that and wow, I’m so positive… let me say now that the aforementioned client/project situation in May really, really, really, truly sucked.

Onwards and upwards to 2012!