The Obvious: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed

Play fair – what a concept

People – even people who are skeptical and cautious and cynical – have trouble maintaining their doubting attitude toward someone who is polite, asks how they’re doing, respects their time, keeps promises, responds openly, treats them with dignity. It’s just so … reasonable. You’ll find you actually get your way, achieve your goals, make your sales, sign your deals, get hired, get promoted, make more money, by being equitable, kind, decent, and fair.

Playing fair doesn’t mean you give in when challenged or automatically compromise. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. On the contrary, it signals your strength. It means you’re sensitive, mature, sensible, open, intelligent, rational, consistent, and firm when necessary. Could anything be better? And besides, there’s no downside.

Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, offers on-site childcare. Why? Investment banks aren’t known for their short hours so this way the company makes it easy for parents to maximize output and minimize guilt.

Law firm Arnold & Porter lets associates spend six months at public interest organizations; has ombudsmen to handle employee issues, and a peer committee to give lower-ranking lawyers a voice. Do these policies make Arnold & Porter a bunch of patsies? No, they just know what it takes to make better lawyers and keep them.

At American Express, women hold nearly 57% of managerial and supervisory positions and make up 40% of executives and senior managers. Minorities hold more than 18% of positions at those levels. Diversity is a stated policy and value on the AmEx Web site. Are they acting out of social pressure or good business? Both. Sensitivity is smart. Qualified women and minorities have their pick of jobs. And of credit cards. The more they pick American Express, the better.

Google, the company that has changed or discarded almost all the old rules of business, not surprisingly operates under a very non-corporate-sounding motto: Do no evil. Not only is that their guiding principle in business practice, but it has resulted in a wholesale redefinition of the term “employee benefits.” At Google, benefits include onsite medical and dental care, a $500 allowance for take-out meals for new parents, child care, adoption assistance, shuttle service, at-work dry cleaning and haircuts, and a fuel efficient vehicle incentive.

Playing fair works. And it doesn’t mean you’re a pushover … unless a pushover is smart, sensitive, evenhanded, sound, and strong.

You’re judged by the company you keep

Every year Fortune Magazine assembles a list of the best companies to work for. Take a look at a recent sampling. They’re of different sizes, categories, parts of the country and the world, seemingly with little in common but the fact that people like to work for them. But, in fact, there is a pattern, their management practices:

Ikea – This Swedish furniture retailer gives employees extraordinary opportunities. They’re encouraged to take international assignments, with employment opportunities or tuition allowances for spouses.

Pfizer – World-class benefits are offered at this huge drug company, including on-site childcare at four locations (parents pay on a sliding scale based on income) and an elder-care program that includes counseling.

Men’s Wearhouse – Company execs gave away 113 trips to Hawaii at holiday parties in 2003. For those who didn’t score tickets, a three-week paid sabbatical is available after five years; 619 employees took one in 2003.

General Mills – This food company makes it easy for employees to get smart: It reimburses tuition at 100% up to $6,000 per year, even for new employees. And if the employees leave afterward, they need not repay the money.

Proctor & Gamble – Now here’s an innovation: The consumer-products giant pairs junior female employees with a senior manager for reverse mentoring to help the mostly male higher-ups understand the issues women face.

In every case, management has been responsive, even pre-emptive to employee issues. These CEOs, COOs, and CFOs could have simply ignored the human needs of their workforces, rationalizing that each worker, whether on an assembly line or in a windowed office, was getting a paycheck and if any of them wanted different conditions or benefits or understanding, he or she could simply work elsewhere. Instead, these managers determined that they would get a much greater return by being reasonable, kind, decent, fair … that is, nice. And the attitude filters down through the ranks, through every level of management, perpetuating itself throughout the organizations. As it turns out, by and large, these companies are also highly successful, year after year, in up and down economies. Coincidence? Hardly.

Do business the way these kinds of corporations and executives do and you’re in good company. Do business as a jerk and you’re not. Either way, you can probably make money. But when it comes time to hire or win new customers or just look at yourself in the mirror, whose company do you want to keep?

Every day your job is to solve impossible problems: unhappy clients, over-worked employees, rising costs, falling quality, late shipments, broken products, broken promises, fierce competition, out-sourcing, down-sizing, shrinking margins, inflation, deflation, interest rates, overheads…

But the fact is inside most business problems is a solution trying to get out. It’s just that we’re usually making too much of our own noise – selling, pitching, assuring, assuaging, talking, talking, talking – to hear the solution.

Stop talking! Start listening! Your customer, client, vendor, shipper, contractor, supervisor, boss, competitor, whomever is trying to tell you the answers if only you’d pay attention. As they teach young medical students, “When you hear hoof beats, don’t look for zebras.”

Listen twice as much as you talk and you’ll learn twice as much, and solve twice as many problems.

Shut up

It’s hard. When you hear a problem, you want to make it go away. With words – Let me explain. It’s really like this I promise. Got it. Done. No problem. But the problem is still there. It’s just buried under a barrage of language. Next time you face an issue, next time your reflex reaction is to say something … don’t. Not a sentence, not a word, not a grunt. Just imagine you have a mute button and push it. Close your mouth. The mere silence will communicate that you’re taking the issue seriously. What isn’t said can be as powerful as what is.

McDonald’s is famous for their all-powerful ad campaigns – slogans, songs, promotions, in every medium, 24/7 – based on the belief if they sell hard enough and loud enough, we’ll all buy it. They should have lowered their volume enough to hear the stampede to the salad bar, granola bars, yogurts, fruits, and bottled waters. They’d have realized sooner that some people in the family, the car, or the office group don’t want deep-fried, high-fat, super-sized, mega-meals. And if you don’t have something else for those people, you run the risk of losing the rest of the people. So they had to play an expensive game of menu catch-up.

A simple test: You’re invited to present your product line to a new customer. Before you even begin, he tells you his last vendor’s goods often arrived late, didn’t measure up to specs, and came in over budget. Then he tells you that all salespeople over-promise. Your lips part, your tongue is poised, your brain is composing rebuttals: Not us. Not my company. Not my products. Whoa. Close your mouth. Look him in the eye. Wait. What’s the message? You hear him. You’re not like other vendors. Not talking, not selling, not promising, and just absorbing the situation, the issue, or the problem is the first step to solving it.

Listen. Then hear.

Once it’s quiet, open your ears. Listen to the words, the volume, the inflection, nuance, whispers, emotion, pauses, even repetition. The people presenting the problems are trying to give you the answers. Let them.

If he makes money, you make money: Your new shopping center tenant invested his life savings in a business with high potential sales per square foot. What kind of lease do you offer: high fixed rent or low base plus overages on sales? He’s practically screaming the answer. He invested his life savings so he can’t pay much during start-up. But if he makes money, he’s happy for you to make money. Low base plus overages.

Conventional wisdom? Your investment client – single mother of two, manager of women’s boutique, facing private school tuition, a car payment, and full-time nanny – inherits $150,000 from her uncle. How do you recommend she invest it? Conventional wisdom says a diversified portfolio of growth stocks, mutual funds, and high-rated bonds. But if you’d have been listening, you’d know she needs income more than growth. Fewer stocks and mutual funds, more high-yield bonds, throwing off cash for expenses.

The early boss. Your supervisor gets in early every morning, walks the office to see who’s there. Even if you’re a high-producing sales rep, he’s giving you a message: Get in early. His message may be silent, but it’s loud and clear … if you’re listening.

When you go to work tomorrow, you can be sure you’ll be hit with a problem or two. Before you open your mouth, open your ears. The person with the problem is trying to give you the solution. Listen to the problem. Hear the answer.

You can learn a lot from great listeners. And bad ones.

Look at the marketplace and you can tell who’s been listening to the solutions within the problems and who hasn’t.

Target heard Wal-Mart customers saying they liked the prices, not the style, or lack thereof. So Target signed up designers like Michael Graves (home appliances and kitchenware), Isaac Mizrahi (fashion and furniture), Mossimo (beach and casualwear), and Thomas O’Brien (vintage/modern combinations for home décor).

Car rental companies heard travelers say, when the plane lands, they want to get in a car and go, not stand in line, fill out forms, show their license, swipe their credit card, accept or decline insurance, fill up or return empty, etc, etc. So they created Number One Clubs, Preferreds, and Emerald Aisles to preregister data, so members can get off the plane, get in a car and … go! They even pay extra to belong, which shows that listening pays.

Cable companies still don’t hear. Customers can’t wait at home between 8 and 12 or 1 and 5 for an installer who may or may not show up.

Online universities heard the problem and the solution. Lots of students can’t go to an ivy-covered institution paid for by mom and dad. Some have to work, raise families, or take care of a parent. They get online degrees without leaving home or the office.

Banks used to only see customers during “bankers’ hours.” Then they found they could handle more customers with ATMs and online banking, 24/7, for less than keeping the branches staffed even a few hours a day. Cable companies, take note.

Most newspapers still haven’t heard. They sit unread on front porches and in vending boxes, barely changing format or content, creating virtually no synergy between their paper and online versions, while the world turns to CNN, Bloomberg, C-Span, The Daily Show, satellite radio, MSN, dotcoms, and blogs.

Consumers honked through heavy traffic until we got HOV lanes and EZ Passes, complained about unsanitary bathrooms until we got automatic flushes, demanded and got free wireless internet thanks to Starbucks and others. Now we want parking meters that don’t need exact change, humans instead of phone prompts, and cars that don’t dent … in case someone is listening.

Listen. You will look brilliant when all you’re doing is giving people what they’re asking for.

It’s okay to be ignorant. It’s not okay to stay that way

Humans have a fear of appearing stupid. So we try to act like we know what we’re doing, especially at work, even when we don’t have a clue. The problem isn’t appearing stupid. It’s being stupid. Albert Einstein, who knew a thing or two, said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

Ignorance is the absence of knowledge. It can be fixed. Stupidity, on the other hand, is not even knowing what you don’t know. Go get some knowledge, fill the void, and the problem is solved. Research. Read. Find a mentor. Imitate. Absorb. Test. Validate.

If you’re ignorant, as the Wright Brothers were, you don’t understand why birds can fly and humans cannot. So, you study the elements of aerodynamics – wind resistance, acceleration, lift, drag, etc. – and fill the void with knowledge. The result? The development of the airplane, from props to jets, airlines from the first airline, TWA, to the latest no frills flyer, to airports, runways, towers, flight attendants, baggage handlers, ticket machines, metal detectors, reclining seats, air sickness bags, and miniature liquor bottles – one of the largest industries in the history of the world. But if you’re stupid, you flap your arms and crash to earth, with luck only breaking a leg.

Ignorance is temporary. It can be cured with knowledge. Stupidity, on the other hand, is forever.

Ask. It’s a great way to find out what you don’t know.

Animals learn by experiences only, especially bad experiences. Big animals eat little animals. Lesson: Avoid big animals. It’s getting cold out and there’s no food. Lesson: Store nuts for winter.

But we humans have an advantage over other animals. We don’t have to wait for bad experiences in order to learn. We don’t have to lose an account, a customer, an order, or our job, to learn. We have a shortcut.

When we don’t understand, we can ask. But we rarely do. We refuse to ask the very questions that would have informed us and prevented or fixed the problem we face.

All we had to do was ask. What time is the audit committee meeting? Do fair trade laws apply in California? How do you get from the Denver Airport to the client’s office? Is it plugged in? Will the boss be there? Can I wear jeans? What was the stock’s closing price? Can we amend our offer? Do we have a contingency plan? How does that work?

Journalists live by who, what, where, when, and how. Ask.com is an entire website devoted to answering questions. Today, virtually every business offers us FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions. Why? Because they’re really FNAQs – Frequently Not Asked Questions (we’re too embarrassed to ask) that once answered, can save us a lot of trouble.

Asking not only provides and clarifies information, prepares us for what may come, assures that we can execute as promised, avoids embarrassment, covers our tails … but it also gives rise to new ideas.

What if Fred Smith had never wondered why it took the U.S. Post Office so long to get packages from one place to another? He might never have created Federal Express.

What if no one had ever asked the furniture questions: How come it costs so much? Why do you have to order it and wait so long? Why can’t you take it home and put it together? Ikea might never have come into existence and introduced the Björkudden dining table or the Leksvik dresser, which we can’t pronounce but which we can take home, assemble in a few minutes with the small tool provided, and even afford to replace when we move or our tastes change.

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