Coloring Outside the Lines. Jeff Tobe

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       The Symptoms

      What are the symptoms? I’ve discovered seven. As I describe them, see if they apply to you, your organization or someone close to you because you could be responsible for curing this dreadful disease and turn out to be a hero. These are the primary reasons that people are unable to see their “Harvey.”

       #1 Internal Myopia

      Are you all familiar with myopia? What is it? Near-sightedness. What happens with Internal Myopia is that you are so focused on the internal aspects of your organization—with the business itself—that you can’t see the environment. You miss what’s happening around you by failing to see the big picture.

       #2 Ostrich Syndrome

      Ostriches bury their heads in the sand while they leave another part of themselves exposed!

      If you have the ostrich syndrome, you may not simply ignore reality, you may choose to deny it even exits. There are probably some of you who still deny the fact that information technology and the ‘cloud’ will change the way you do business. There are some people in your industry who deny the fact that their firm can no longer be everything to everyone—that you no longer can expect to gain a client for life. I’m not talking about you losing the client as much as I am about the client’s infrastructure being likely to change and leave you behind. They have ostrich syndrome.

       #3 Past-a-Plegia

      What this means is paralysis in the past.

      This is looking in your rear view mirror.

      “What was good enough for the company in 10 years ago is good enough nowadays!” I like to coin the words of a large automobile manufacturer years ago when they said “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile”. This is not the way business has been done in the past, yet I find so many organizations suffering from this syndrome. Little things hang around from the past to haunt us.

       #4 Psycho-Sclerosis

      If you have had any dealings in health care, you may recognize this symptom. It’s also known as “My way or the highway.” Today, I hear it manifest itself in organizations in the following ways:

       “We’ve never done that before!”

       “That’s never been done in this profession before!”

       “Last time we tried that it didn’t work!”

       #5 Feedback Immunity

      Do you know anyone who is immune to feedback? Sure. This just doesn’t mean personal feedback from a superior or peer but, more important, feedback from the marketplace. There are those who choose to ignore this symptom because they are so married to the success of the idea that they are unable to process the feedback of the marketplace when it doesn’t work. Because we live in a ‘customer service oriented environment’, I think that this symptom has changed. We MUST respond to our customers’ feedback BUT we also have to consider how QUICKLY you respond. It can be something as simple as “How quickly do you return my call when I leave a message on your voice mail?”

       #6 Expertitis

      This occurs when you know so much about one area nobody can teach you anything new. You become convinced that all the ideas in that area or field have been invented so you might as well not think of any more.

      There was a man in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office who, in 1899 went on a crusade to close the Patent and Trademark Office. He believed everything that was going to be invented had already been invented. Then he proceeded to ride home on his horse!

       #7 Failure-Phobia

      This is the fear of making mistakes. In his book Surviving On Chaos, Tom Peters talks about how “successful businesses are those who can fail fast and often”. Although most people are afraid of making mistakes, you can never learn anything without making them? Most people are not comfortable with the idea of making mistakes—of failing. Mistakes are a necessary byproduct of the whole creative process. Mistakes are opportunities for learning.

       The Cure

      There are 5 steps to curing this syndrome…to seeing your Harvey…to seeing the invisible…to seeing what others are unable to see. These 5 steps may seem very basic to you at first but, as any professional athlete—any Olympian—would quickly remind you, victory often comes from sticking to the basics.

       #1 Learn to See the World Through Your Client’s Eyes

      I would like to relate a story to you that illustrates this better than I could on my own. It’s from a book that many people have forgotten—written in the 1950’s by G. Lyn Sumner—called HOW I LEARNED THE SECRETS OF SUCCESS IN ADVERTISING. He tells a story that perfectly illustrates how important it is to see the world through your client’s eyes. As I share this, think about how you can associate this to your business:

       “It makes no difference whether you are using a full page ad in a magazine or a 5 line classified, it is not the space but what you say in that space that determines the success of that advertisement. Let me give you an example: Our maid had left us and as was the custom in Scranton Pennsylvania, Mrs. Sumner resorted to the method that everyone used to get another one. She called up the Scranton Times, an afternoon paper and asked that the following advertisement be inserted in the classified section under HELP WANTED—FEMALE.

       “WANTED—Girl for general housework.

       727 North Irving Avenue.”

       The ad ran for 3 days and nothing happened. It was repeated for 3 days more and when still nobody answered it, I made the suggestion that possibly the copy was at fault. Mrs. Sumner said, “All right. You’re an advertising writer. If you’re so smart, suppose you see what you can do.

       I was very professional in my approach. I said it’s easy to understand. Here’s a solid column of Want Ads all reading the same:

       ‘WANTED..MAID FOR GENERAL HOUSE WORK’.

       Suppose there is a maid in all of Scranton, who wants a position or wants to change her position, which one of these ads is she going to read?

       Now, let us put ourselves in the position of the maid herself. Every client has some fault to find with the work we are doing. Every maid has some fault to find with her place of employment. And she has in her mind, her own conception of the ideal place in which to work as every client has in their mind their own perception of their own solution to their own problems.

       Let us present our home and all of it’s attractiveness in terms of those selling points that will appeal to her. So, I prepared a piece of copy that read like this…

       “WANTED…girl to do general housework in small, new home in quiet, attractive hill section. All hardwood floors—easy to keep clean. No washing. No furnace to take СКАЧАТЬ