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PART ONE: PROBLEM

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CHAPTER 1:

AWASH IN BITS AND BULLETS

CLICK, CLICK, CLICK…

In life and in business, we are awash in “bits and bullets.” Bits and bullets are data. Facts. Bullet points on slides. Computer screens full of information. Headlines and scores ticking across the bottom of our televisions 24/7. A constant stream of ads and pitches and talking heads. Sometimes it feels like life has become one big infomercial. And the constant stream of bits and bullets doesn’t stop when we get to work. In fact, it accelerates. As leaders, most of us have never met an e-mail device or a PowerPoint slide we didn’t like. Because technology makes communicating in bits and bullets so easy, we unleash the flood.

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun, but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.

– EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY¹

No question about it, leaders have a tough job. We are asked to deliver better performance through our people, implement the latest systems, manage goals, communicate and embody company values, and hundreds of other things. We are brokers of information. Leaders above us hand down information we need—division goals, new systems information, competitive data, new products—and then we translate that information, communicate it to our people, and perform against the goals.

Leaders of every stripe, from senior executives and middle managers to salespeople and consultants, spend an inordinate amount of time creating and brokering information, but we spend far less time standing back from that information and asking, “What is the best way for me to communicate this?” Not asking this critical question too often results in the creation of just more bits and bullets. That is, we use the same communication methods we always use the same way we always use them, which means that we whip out the laptop, throw together some slides, call a meeting, and then it’s click, click, click.

NUMBERS OR LIVES?

A couple of years ago, I was at a meeting where Ray Gilmartin, the CEO of Merck, was speaking. The purpose of his talk was to discuss how the economy and regulation were affecting the drug industry. Leading into some of the main points of his talk, he wanted to make sure that people in the room had a strong sense for what Merck had contributed to the world through the company’s development of critical, lifesaving drugs. What happened next was a perfect illustration of the power of stories.

Ray Gilmartin talked about the company’s philanthropy and the amounts that had been given to certain causes. He outlined the drugs, such as Mectizan, that Merck had developed to treat river blindness, and the company’s antiretroviral program to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa and China. Thus began a long list of impressive accomplishments, and as he talked about them, he gave specific numbers for each; 800,000 vaccines of this in Botswana, 1.4 million vaccines of that in the Americas; and list went on.

These were amazing numbers and any company would be very proud. But what was fascinating was how the crowd reacted. He was losing his audience. As he rattled off more and more numbers, people started to tune out. We were getting lost in the bullet points and losing the true value of the message itself. Instead of being duly impressed with the number of lives saved, we were wondering when he would stop.

Then he did stop. Ray Gilmartin became reflective as he stood on the stage; he paused, and then he related this story: Back in 1942, there was a young woman who contracted an infection after a miscarriage and had been hospitalized in Connecticut for a month. For the entire month, she had been running a fever as high as 105 degrees and was in and out of consciousness. Her doctors were desperate to find a treatment for her, but nothing worked. This young woman was going to die. One of her doctors remembered talking to a colleague about an experimental treatment that was largely unsuccessful, but it was worth a try. The doctors managed to secure a small sample from a lab at Merck—half of what existed in the United States at the time. They tried it. This woman, Anne Miller, became the first person in the United States to receive this new drug, penicillin. And it saved her life.

When Ray Gilmartin finished this story, the audience was completely quiet. We were all picturing in our mind’s eye this young woman and the tragic fact that she was going to die. We were picturing our own families and we could feel pain for her family. We were relieved when we were told that she survived and that this new drug had saved her life. This tiny little story had a huge impact. It brought home to us what companies like Merck do. They develop drugs that save people, and all of the statistics in the world about lives saved are not as meaningful as that short story about one person. The story brought each of us into the problem. It created a context to which we could relate. It created an emotional response from us. We could feel it. And it was a great illustration of the difference between stories and bits and bullets.

Our leaders want us to know certain things. They want us to know how to serve customers. They want us to know the mission of the company and how it makes money. They want us to know how to treat each other. In the story above, Ray Gilmartin wanted us to know what Merck cares about and the company’s commitment to taking care of people.

In the first part of this Merck story, we are awash in bits and bullets. At some point in presentations like these (usually in the first five minutes), we are lost in the minutiae, drowning in data. That’s when we all begin to daydream about lunch or that last vacation we took.

But here, Ray Gilmartin snapped us back from oblivion with a great story. One of the things we will see in the coming pages is that it’s the lessons contained in the story that we remember, not the bits and bullets.

“Like desperate Gullivers, we’re pinned down by too much information and too much stuff. By one estimate, the world produced five exabytes (or quintillion bytes) of content in 2002—the same amount churned out between 25,000 BC and AD 2000. Little wonder that Real Simple has been the most successful magazine launch in a decade, and the blogosphere is abuzz over the season’s hottest tech innovation: the Hipster PDA (15 index cards held together by a binder clip).”

– LINDA TISCHLER²

DEFINITION: Bits and bullets, noun: 1. Facts and data, parsed into short abbreviations or phrases. 2. Facts and data devoid of all contexts. 3. Short bursts of information that can be very useful but also frequently make you say “huh?” or “what the…?” Usually accompanied by an itty-bitty dot, such as:

• This is the bullet of a bit.

WE ARE ALL FIGHTER PILOTS

The person in Figure 1.1 is you! And me. All of us. This is the way we live now. And it’s nothing short of revolutionary how much rich information and entertainment is at our fingertips. If information were food, we would be constantly surrounded by the most outrageous perpetual feast ever created.

Several recent surveys have looked at how people in organizations are dealing with this information flow. One survey found that “the average user spent 3 hours and 14 minutes using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour workday.”³ Here’s how the average user spent that three-plus hours:

• E-mail—45% of information processing (IP) time

• Telephone calls, conference calls, and voicemail—24% of IP time

• Shared network usage—18% of IP time

• Portal Web site—8% of IP time

• Instant messaging/text messaging—5% of IP time⁴

FIGURE 1.1 Where You Get Information

The survey results also suggest that less than 50 percent of respondents feel that they are in control of how they manage all of this information. The most surprising finding, though, is that most survey respondents have simply not thought about this issue very much, and thus are not conscious of strategies for managing their personal information.⁵ The scary thing is that you are probably looking at these numbers above and thinking, “I wish that were me! That ‘average user’ has it easy!”

“I bought a cell phone in 2005. I finally caved. I just didn’t want to be known as ‘that guy without the cell phone.’”

– TAYLOR HESS⁶

Another interesting aspect of this research is that it doesn’t look at other forms of technology that we are increasingly using, such as digital music players, digital video recorders, satellite radio, and the Internet. When lumped together with the usual suspects—e-mail, voicemail, and cell phones—it becomes clear that information (and entertainment) is finding and filling every remaining minute of time in our lives.

Surveys like the ones noted above suggest that the pendulum is just starting to swing from unmitigated fascination with technology-enabled access to information to the necessity of having strategies for managing information overload and its negative impact on our productivity.

Another sign that the pendulum may be starting to swing back toward the center is the nascent field of interruption science. This branch of study is gaining a lot of attention because it seeks to understand when it’s best and most efficient to interrupt a person at work.

Doesn’t this strike you as odd? We have so much technology that interrupts us that we are now studying how to use technology to improve the productivity of interruptions! It seems that we have come to the realization that the constant stream of information, along with its inevitable interruptions, needs to be managed proactively just so we can get something done!

Computers, of course, are both the hero and the villain. As Clive Thompson put it, in an article about interruption science in the New York Times Magazine, personal computers began life as “little more than glorified word-processors and calculators,”⁸ but then things began to change. Thompson continues:

“The information glut is hardly the apocalypse that some imagined might come about at the millennium. The world’s not ending, it’s just becoming incomprehensible.”

– JOEL ACHENBACH⁷

“‘Multitasking’ was born; instead of simply working on one program for hours at a time, a computer user could work on several different ones simultaneously. Corporations seized on this as a way to squeeze more productivity out of each worker, and technology companies like Microsoft obliged them by transforming the computer into a hub for every conceivable task, and laying on the available information with a trowel. The Internet accelerated this trend even further, since it turned the computer from a sealed box into our primary tool for communication (emphasis added). As a result, office denizens now stare at computer screens of mind-boggling complexity, as they juggle messages, text documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and Web browsers all at once. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots.”9

“To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.”

– CLIVE THOMPSON¹⁰

Fighter pilots indeed. Organizations make incredibly large investments in technology. What is the purpose of all of these systems and devices? To help us perform better, of course. What other reason could possibly justify the spending?

Given the focus on information technology investment in the average organization, it often seems that we put much more effort into selecting systems and devices than we do in understanding how they will actually help us communicate and perform better.

SO, HOW DO WE COM-MU-NI-OATE?

Several important trends are having a profound impact on the way we communicate with each other. First, as stated above, technology has given us many ways to communicate. Second, we are now working in many different places (and often alone). Third, globalization and technology have come together to enable us to work remotely and get things done from the car or airplane or basement office, and communicate in myriad different ways. Finally, layers of management have been consolidated and many of us serve as both leaders of others and individual contributors.

“Imagine what we could accomplish if we spent the same time, energy, and money to use the information skills we already know as we do on the tools and technologies otherwise labeled as Information Technology.”

– NATHAN SHEDROFF¹¹

Of course, these trends can have a positive impact on competitiveness by allowing each segment of work to find the lowest available costs. They are also changing how we communicate, in ways both good and bad.

It’s convenient that we can call from the car on the way home to see whether we need any last-minute groceries. It feels more secure to know that our kids and our parents have immediate access to us if they need us. And it’s energizing to be able to collaborate with talented people no matter where they are in the world.

There is also a downside—a downside that people are just beginning to realize. These new ways of communicating have changed the content of our communications. Almost without realizing it, we have begun to communicate in bits and bullets.

“When the bullets are flying, no one is safe.”

– JOHN SCHWARTZ¹²

And now we’re addicted. Like any addiction, after a while it becomes hard to imagine a future without this new stuff. Over time, our behaviors change and we fall into a predictable, repeated pattern. If you are one of those people who say, “I’m not addicted. I can stop if I want to,” just recall the last time you were caught checking your e-mail while someone was talking directly to you. Gotcha!

“A researcher at Microsoft, Mary Czer-winski, has studied how the average computer user behaves and has found them to be “as restless as hummingbirds…. On average, they juggled eight different windows at the same time—a few email messages, maybe a Web page or two and a PowerPoint document. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.”

– CLIVE THOMPSON¹³

In an organization, rules for communication are established the same way as rules that govern any community of people. Social conventions, norms, and accepted ways of communicating are built up and when one becomes part of that community, one must live by those rules. This socialization is beneficial in that it helps us get work done and not have to spend time inventing ways to communicate. We don’t have to think too much about it.

But therein lies the problem. Because we don’t have to spend time thinking through our communications, we don’t. We go back to the usual ways of communicating. And when it comes to high-stakes communications—communications affecting leadership, mission, ethical behavior, and teamwork—we most often find ourselves on the losing side of the battle for hearts and minds. Many times, leaders lose the chance to ignite the performance of their people because they have chosen the expediency of bits and bullets over a more rich and engaging approach.

“Get to the point…I don’t have all minute!”

– ERIC CHESTER¹⁴

LOTS OF TOOLS, NO BLUEPRINTS

Think for a moment about all of the communications tools at our disposal. We have e-mail, a phone, a mobile phone, a pager or BlackBerry, instant messaging, and text messaging. We also have meetings, conferences, and informal conversations. We spend vast amounts of time learning how to use, program, sync, and trouble-shoot our communications tools. We also spend considerable time setting up appointments and managing our calendars.

Once all of these unproductive activities are squared away, do we then turn to our well-thought-out blueprint for how to actually use different tools in different situations so that we can increase performance? Or do we often fall back on the most familiar and expedient—treating all of our tools like hammers and our communications like nails?

“I sometimes think we have become so obsessed with the means of communication that have been developed, that we have lost all contact with the message that is being conveyed.”

– TED KOPPEL¹⁵

As Figure 1.2 shows, our communications devices can actually push us apart, instead of bringing us together. All of this technology-enabled communication we rely on enables us to stay in our cubicle or office (bunker) and get work done. But our devices and tools certainly come with a Faustian bargain. Yes, they speed our access to information and increase our flexibility, allowing us to work wherever we are. But they also take away some of what makes it fun and energizing to work with people; that is, the social interaction and learning we get from each other (especially because we now work all the time).

FIGURE 1.2 How Organizations Communicate

“It is safe to assume that any individual or group you wish to influence has access to more wisdom than they currently use. It is also safe to assume that they also have considerably more facts than they can process effectively. Giving them more facts adds to the wrong pile. They don’t need more facts. They need help finding their wisdom.”

– ANNETTE SIMMONS¹⁷

We have become so incredibly busy sending and receiving email alone that our face-to-face interaction drops like a stone. A client said to me that she asked her employees to turn off their BlackBerrys for a whole day and interact with each other face to face if they needed a piece of information from someone, or needed to convey something. The results were amazing. Her employees told her that they found out so much more about what they needed to know and that it was a lot more fun!¹⁶

One of our main challenges as leaders is to not be like the fish that is oblivious to the water around it. We must take stock of what communication methods we have at our disposal and which one is best suited to the particular task at hand. We should be using a blueprint to determine exactly what kind of communication we will use to impact a specific performance issue.

The worst software feature ever invented.

FIGURE 1.3 New Yorker Cartoon

“Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint presentation?”

– JOHN SCHWARTZ¹⁸

FISH TANK FULL OF GLUE

It’s 1980 and you just walked into your office and you see the following scene unfold. The boss walks out of his office, past the secretary, down the hall to talk to a colleague. The employee and the boss talk, look at a document together, make a few changes, and then hand the document to the secretary for typing. The employee then calls the customer and tells her secretary that he will have the document to her by next Tuesday.

Don’t you get the feeling that all of these people are moving in slow motion? Yuck! It’s almost as if they are working in a fish tank full of glue!

Fast-forward to today. The boss in Chicago e-mails her associate in New York, attaching the document that has been edited with tracking. The associate, who is waiting in line at Starbucks, takes out his BlackBerry and pages a colleague in Hong Kong (where it’s 11 PM) with a quick request for some details. The Hong Kong associate, chatting with some friends in a local pub, feels the buzz of her Treo and responds immediately, after checking some facts on her company’s knowledge portal. The associate in New York then accepts the changes to the document and e-mails it to the client. The client, working from home that day, calls the associate’s mobile phone to ask him for one final change. The associate pages his boss, she accepts the change, and the client is satisfied.

Isn’t this much more exciting? Yes! It’s fast-paced, high-tech, and you get the feeling that all of these people are sipping espressos and wearing Armani suits (actually, they are).

The best software feature ever invented.

What is missing in this story? In the first part of the story, the pace is excruciatingly slow. It is so slow that it’s painful to imagine. What’s missing are all of the technology enablers that would get the job done faster and the urgency created by a more competitive environment, so the scene plays out in slow motion. What is present, though, is the increased interaction between the people. Because there is a lack of technology enablers, there is more time for interaction, for conversation, and for stories.

“So this is how we end up alone together. We share a coffee shop, but we are all on wireless laptops. The subway is a symphony of earplugged silence while the family trip has become a time when the kids watch DVDs in the back of the minivan. The water cooler, that nexus of chatter about the show last night, might go silent as we create disparate, customized media environments.”

– DAVID CARR¹⁹

This is not to say that today we lack all interaction. We have more interaction with each other than we have ever had before, and a lot of that interaction is a positive development. But, we make far fewer opportunities to share stories, and that’s what we need to change. We all seem to be much busier, and technology enables our busy lifestyles. But how do we bring back some of the richness without sacrificing the reach? How do we create relationships that go beyond transactions?

I’m not suggesting that we go back to the olden days. Not at all (I like a good espresso as much as the next guy). But I’m suggesting that we become more aware of our stories, and that we look for opportunities to embed our stories in our communications, because this is great a way to help us manage our information and increase our performance.

SMALL GROWS UP

The march of technology and its effects on our behavior is the same as the story of how “small” became “large.” Remember when a “small” was actually small? When you asked for a small coffee, it came in a cute little cup. When you asked for a small Coke, you got a small Coke. But then small grew up, got bigger, started putting on weight, and never looked back. Whether that “small” was a coffee, a soda, restaurant portions, football players, cars, or even suburbs, your first thought was probably, “Wow, this is great. I am getting so much more for my money!” So we order all of those smalls and larges and we feel like we are really getting a deal until we suddenly realize that none of our pants fit! It costs us $60 to fill up our gas tanks and our 25-minute commute is now and hour and a half. Maybe we’ve had too much. When did that become acceptable? And how long does it take us to realize that some of this stuff is bad for us?

The late Neil Postman once compared our inability to deal with the vast amounts of information pouring over us to the AIDS epidemic. He said the following in a speech in 1990:

“[That is,] we don’t know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don’t know how to filter it out; we don’t know how to reduce it; we don’t know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.” ²⁰

“In reality there has not been an information explosion, but rather an explosion of non-information, or data that simply doesn’t inform.”

– RICHARD SAUL WURMAN²¹

Anyone who has used a cell phone, pager, or BlackBerry knows what Postman was talking about. We have all felt the crush of information overload. Anyone who has gone into an hour-long meeting and come out to find 35 new e-mails has felt it. Anyone who has witnessed a 95-page PowerPoint presentation has felt it. And anyone who has had to explain to their spouse why they are bringing the laptop on vacation has felt it.

I put a slightly different (and more positive) characterization on our inability to deal with the deluge of information. I believe we have created for ourselves another incredibly widespread disorder called “story deficit disorder,” or SDD. Like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or, more commonly, ADD), SDD causes leaders to jump from one communication or task to the next without thinking through the impact they are having on their own performance or the performance of their people.

“It’s hard to remember that movies were once just a high-tech gimmick under the control of the engineer. Movies didn’t flourish until the engineers lost control to the artists—the writers, actors, musicians, and directors (Heckel, 1984). Thanks to their imaginative manipulation of technology, a film’s content now transparently connects to our minds.”

– MARTY SIEGEL²²

DEFINITION: Story deficit disorder (SDD), noun: 1. Common disorder caused by misuse of bits and bullets and resulting lack of stories; symptoms include disorientation, stress, information overload, numbness of the thumbs, immediate onset of narcolepsy at company meetings, rampant sarcasm, and cynicism. Recommended treatment: become a farmer. If farming is not an option, demand more stories in all aspects of your work and life.

Although a bit tongue-in-cheek, there’s a very real drawback to story deficit disorder. Because people bounce too frequently from one thing to another and their attention span is shorter and shorter, people pay less attention to the communications that really matter. And when, as leaders, we can’t reach our people with an important change, performance of the organization suffers and our own performance suffers.

BUILDING MUSCLE, NOT FAT

Over the past 20 years, we have figured out how to put most of what happens in business in a system of some sort, and the beauty of this is that it makes things like sales performance, claims processed, call times, and delivery schedules much easier to measure. But the challenge we have created for ourselves is that the muscles (our people) that hold the skeleton (our systems) together are really hard to measure. Building those muscles requires what I call “performance skills.”

“It’s the people, stupid. You can take any management discipline from the past few years: total quality, reengineering, enterprise-resource planning, and now CRM. In every one of those instances, the failure has been addressing behavioral issues.”

– PAUL COLE²³

DEFINITION: Performance skills, noun: 1. Hard-to-quantify skills like leadership, ethical decision making, teamwork, coaching, giving and receiving feedback, building client delight, strategic selling, negotiating, business acumen, sharing insights, and inspiring the true “muscle” of business. Skills that require judgment and a high EQ. Skills that require constant practice and reinforcement through leadership, mentoring, strong communications, powerful learning solutions, and a little bit of luck.

DEFINITION: Showing up skills, noun: 1. Easy-to-quantify skills that come “stock,” such as computer skills, basic communications, presentation and project management skills, honesty, and integrity. 2. The “please” and “thank you” skills that every employee (and every person) should “show up” with.

In Figure 1.4, we see how bits and bullets have a diminishing impact on performance. To expose people to information such as policies and procedures, there is nothing better than bits and bullets. But as we expect people to build new skills or apply their existing skills to a new situation or set of goals, we must move into story territory.

Just as we often shape our messages into bits and bullets to accommodate our devices, many companies have organized their communications and learning solutions in such a way as to accommodate technology, not the other way around. For example, just like most companies bought CRM systems, many organizations have now purchased and installed a “learning management system,” or LMS. The purpose of an LMS is to, of course, manage learning by distributing and tracking courses taken and compliance achieved.

“We have spent all of this money and built all of these systems to house information and ‘learning’ with the expectation that we are creating value. What we’ve created instead are just corporate landfills.”

– MARTY SIEGEL²⁴

Systems like these offer some clear benefits, such as providing a common access point to materials, logistical information, and training for hard skills (e.g., using a spreadsheet program or CRM system).

One of the unintended consequences of these systems is that performance skills are now treated like a discrete item (think call times, packages delivered, or number of employees that have completed diversity training). That is, LMS systems only work well when they are acting like databases. (“We know Bill took this course and when, and we even know how he did on the final quiz.”)

FIGURE 1.4 Application of Stories

WHY ARE WE GOING SOFT?

In the consulting and learning businesses, we are our own worst enemy. In an attempt to appear more credible, we create language that makes no sense to business leaders. We refer to skills as competencies and we build elaborate learning management systems that are just expensive repositories that further undermine our credibility. But the worst offense of all is when we refer to any skill that is not technology-driven—a “hard” skill such as learning to use Microsoft Excel—as a “soft” skill. It’s no wonder businesspeople don’t take their own learning professionals seriously. The terms we use make it sound like we are building fat instead of muscle! These soft skills aren’t soft at all; they are the “performance” skills and muscle that enable organizations to grow and succeed.

But what if the performance skills that are most critical to our success and our organizations don’t lend themselves to being easily tracked and measured? Then we have to find a way to build these types of skills and make our technology work for us.

“So far, for 50 years, the information revolution has centered on data—their collection, storage, transmission, analysis, and presentation. It has centered on the ‘T’ in IT. The information revolution asks, What is the MEANING of information, and what is the PURPOSE?”

– PETER DRUCKER²⁵

This is one of the keys to being a leader (and high performer) in our time: We are moving so fast and juggling so much that we must make time to distinguish between information that can be trusted to bits and bullets and information that demands a story. You read that right: we must make time. But before you throw this book into the cardboard box marked “Sell on eBay,” read on. This book’s purpose is to convince you that there are powerful tools at your disposal—indeed, some you may already use—that will save you time and make you perform better, in business and in life. A tall order? Certainly. And the journey begins with making the critical distinction between bits and bullets and stories.

CHAPTER 1:

SUMMARY

THE BITS AND BULLETS

• If we are not careful and cognizant of how we are brokering information, we can overwhelm ourselves and our people and cause performance to suffer.

• Learn your vocabulary words!

— Bits and bullets—data, facts, and information without context

— Performance skills—the true muscle of business

— Showing up skills—the dowry you bring to your job

— Story deficit disorder—lack of stories to aid learning

• PowerPoint is not evil, but it often brings out the worst in us.

• With the information we have at our fingertips, we are all fighter pilots now. We may look and feel cool surrounded by all of this technology, but what counts is the target.

• We have a choice. We don’t have to perpetuate the bits and bullets. There is another way.

THE PICTURES

Where You Get Information You’re surrounded!

How Organizations Communicate Technology and information can push us apart

The “Delete” button and the “Reply All” button The good and evil of communications!

New Yorker Cartoon Too many bullets is painful

Application of Stories Be aware of your “mix” of stories and bits and bullets

THE STORIES

Numbers or Lives? Ray Gilmartin’s story about penicillin

Fish Tank Full of Glue We all want to be cool and important

Small Grows Up Sometimes, what looks like a great deal is exactly the opposite

Why Are We Going Soft? Talk about performance skills, not soft skills

CHAPTER 1:

MY THOUGHTS AND IDEAS