Do you remember the book, All I need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? In it, author Robert Fulghum recounts important life lessons from kindergarten like: play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, take a nap every afternoon, and say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Well, I recently came upon some sales reminders worth sharing from my favorite kindergartner, Lily Grace. Lily, my granddaughter, was spending the day with me because she was a little under the weather. Late morning, she proposed that we go out for lunch, “just to get out of the house”. This worked well because we also needed to get some dog treats for our Sheltie, Louis Renault (named for the deliciously corrupt Claude Rains character in Casablanca).

Here is where the salesmanship began. Finishing lunch, Lily proposed that we go to nearby Target for Louis’ treats. “That’s where my mom gets food for our dogs.” She got permission, by providing a highly credible source we both know and love: her mom, my daughter.

Once at Target with dog treats secured, Lily offered, “There is something else I’d like to show you.” She leveraged her successful recommendation on Target, to gain a deeper level of permission to show me a pair of shoes she had been eyeing.

Now at the footwear department in Target, she showed me the shoes she desired and appealed first to my, not her, practical buying criteria. “They are the perfect size”, she exclaimed. “Look”, she said, “there is room to grow!” Good salespeople always understand the buyer’s criteria and address them up front. Her presentation was enthusiastic and engaging.

Needless to say, Lily won the shoes. When her mom picked her up later that day, I learned that this was Lily’s third pitch on the shoes. She had previously failed with both her mom and her grand mom. This illustrates the most desirable, native talent in salespeople: persistence.

Here are the sales lessons Lily demonstrated:

1. Get permission using a credible reference
2. Leverage that permission
3. Understand and appeal to the buyer’s criteria
4. Make an enthusiastic presentation
5. Be persistent

This is not a comprehensive overview of what we need to do to succeed in sales. For that matter, Fulghum’s essays did not pretend to cover everything we need to do to live happy, fulfilling lives. Hopefully, though, they serve as fun reminders for both.

Over the years, I have written in the SST¹ Newsletter on personality type and presidential politics. The basic theme has been that the more Extraverted candidate wins.

Our first analysis goes back to 1996 when our SST® (Successful Selling to Type) class chose to study the preferences of the two candidates, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, in one of their debates. It was fascinating because they were as different as possible on the four Jungian scales. Dole (whom we read as ISTJ) appeared stiff and uncomfortable. Conversely, Clinton (whom we saw as an ENFP) was warm and charismatic. He seemed to be able to quickly connect with the audience. Remember, “I feel your pain.”?

In the 2000 election, pitting Al Gore versus George Bush, Extraversion and Introversion again seemed to play a prominent role in how the candidates behaved and were perceived by the voters. Only this time, it was the Republican Bush who was the Extraverted candidate and Democrat Gore who was Introverted. While Bush looked comfortable and energized by people, you may recall that Gore was described as being “wooden”.

In 2004, there was a headline in Knight Ridder papers that read: Voters Don’t Like Bush’s Iraq War or Kerry’s Personality. The article went on to
describe Kerry as cool and private. Once again, the more Extraverted Bush
prevailed.

Eight years later, a recent New York Times article caught my attention, Romney
Supporters Yearning for Personal Connection” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/us/politics/romney-supporters-yearning-for-personal-connection. One of Romney’s aides describes him as having a “natural reticence” to opening up. Indeed, at leastto this observer, he appears awkward whenever he tries and says things like: I like the height of the trees in Michigan or we like American cars –my wife drives two Cadillacs.

If you are wondering about our analysis in 2008, we saw both candidates as
Introverted. But, Obama appears more skilled at adapting his natural INTP style
to connect with his audience.

We certainly are not suggesting that it is all about personality and issues like
the economy and national security don’t matter. Indeed, we believe the issues
should matter the most and personality preferences have nothing to do with
capability. But, just as buyers function on two tracks (content and connection)
so too do voters. As we move toward November 2012, it will be interesting to
view the politics through a personality lens and see which candidate connects
with voters: the cool “No Drama” Obama or Mitt “I like grits” Romney.

1 SST® (Successful Selling to Type) is a personality based
sales method based on Carl Jung’s theory, as is the MBTI or Myers Briggs Type
Indicator www.tildensst.com

My time as an independent consultant (I started in 1994) roughly coincides with the explosion in technology. Back then, many were just getting around to web sites, e-mail and aspiring to be a paperless offices. Today, of course, e-mail communication is more common than that by phone and just about everyone carries some sort of smart device.

But, have these digital tools saved us time and made work more efficient? I think not. Indeed, my observation is that we are busier today, than we were twenty years ago. For many, technology has tethered us to the office and it seems like we never get away.

Managing our time and our tasks has never been more important. If you are interested in improving personal productivity, a good place to start is freeing yourself from the Ten Time Management Myths listed below.

Myth One: The longer I work, the more I get done

My experience as a manager taught me that some of my least productive team members were the ones whose office lights were on the longest. There is a difference between activity and accomplishment. For some, it is easy to get mired into a comfortable and familiar routine of checking and answering e-mails, running computer updates and zoning out in meaningless meetings.

MythTwo: There is one right time management system

Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether it is Franklin-Covey, Harold Taylor, Priority or none of the above. Further, it matters little if your system is maintained on your computer or done with paper-and-pencil.

What is important is that you have a system, that you use, to set priorities and plan your projects.

Myth Three: Multi-tasking Saves Time

We even see it in job announcements: Must be able to multi-task. While on the face of it, doing two things at once would seem to be a time saver. But, it is a myth and debunked by research reported in the New York Times (March 26, 2011) that concludes:

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.” David Meyer, Cognitive Scientist, University of Michigan.

Myth Four: We all have the same challenges when it comes to time management

We are born with natural differences, known as personalities, which shape our challenges for managing time. For each of us, there are some things we do naturally well and some productivity pitfalls peculiar to our personalities.

Myth Five: Technology Saves Time

Really. Is there anyone who thinks we have more time now that we have more technology? The truth is that many of us have allowed technology to control us, rather than the other way around

Myth Six: The biggest time wasters are telephone calls and meetings

It would be nice if we could take calls only when they were important to us and could attend meetings only when we feel like it. However, for many of us taking calls and attending meetings are obligations that come with our positions. Communicating by phone and face-to-face in meetings may be essential to good teamwork and leadership.

Myth Seven: To be really productive we should finish a task once we start it

Simply, some tasks are too big to finish at one sitting. Realistically, what we can do is schedule blocks of time when we can focus on important projects. The length of time and time of day varies by individual.

Myth Eight: Every productive worker has a clear desk top

Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter countered this conventional wisdom with: “A clear desk is the sign of an empty mind.”

Here again, hard wired differences of personality type come into play. Judgers among us might work best with a neat and tidy work area while Perceivers might be at their best with their own filing system.

Myth Nine: Act on every matter that comes your way

An excellent manger once told me that to key good management is classifying everything that comes to you into one of these three categories and acting accordingly. Here is his system: Category 1 Urgent & Mine- Act on it Right Away;  Category 2 Not Urgent but Mine - Act on it Later; Category 3 Not Mine – Ignore it.

Myth Ten: Attending a time management workshop will make me more productive.

While you may have the opportunity to learn important concepts and tools to improve productivity, nothing happens without putting them into practice. You must close the gap between learning and doing and move good time management practices into daily habits.

If you would like to know more about our approach to time management shoot me an e-mail (ajtilden@tildensst.com). Better yet, pick up the phone (814.861.5100)

Putting modesty aside and acknowledging my optimistic nature upfront, here are my predictions for 2012.

One: Packers Win the Super Bowl – This may sound safe, but remember the Phillies?

Two: Civil War in Iraq – Someone smarter than me wrote in 2003 that Iraq was a simmering caldron of civil unrest and Sadam Hussein, evil as he was, was a lid. We took it off.

Three: Tiger Woods Wins a Major – Mixing fun predictions with serious ones, I predict that a healthy Tiger Woods will win a major in 2012.

Four: The Economy Improves Slowly – While the optimist in me sees favorable trends in jobless claims, retail spending, and even housing starts, there is just too much uncertainty (See Instability in Arab World below, not to mention North Korea and the EU) to predict a robust recovery.

Five: Meryl Streep Wins an Oscar – Before I have even seen the movie, I predict that Meryl Streep will win an Oscar for her role as Margaret Thatcher.

Six: Obama Beats Romney – When it is time to go to the polls, I predict voters will look objectively at a president who rescued the country from the brink of economic disaster, saved the US auto industry, reversed the job loss trend (before Obama took office we were losing 400,000 jobs per month), and took out Osama Bin Laden.

Seven: Ron Paul Runs as Third Party Candidate – There is enough “Anybody But Romney” energy on the right to support Ron Paul as a third party candidate. I predict he will play Ross Perot’s 1992 role in the 2012 election.

Eight: Instability in Arab World – What’s going to happen in Egypt? Libya? Bahrain? Syria? Tunisia? Yemen? Who replaces tyrants like Mubarak, Saleh and Qadaffi? Will Iran build a nuclear weapon? How will Israel respond? These are frightening forecasts.

Nine: Newt Gingrich – Man of the Years – I predict Newt Gingrich will use some of the millions he made from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy a magazine from Rupert Murdoch and proclaim himself Man of the Years ranging from 1985 to 2025.

Ten: Throw the Bums Out – With congressional approval ratings as low as 11%, I predict incumbents will be tossed out on their keisters.

Eleven: Weather Will Be a Big Story – After the elimination of Osama Bin Laden, I would rank the weather as the biggest story of 20ll. An earthquake and tsunami caused the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in Japan. Flooding in Thailand resulted in damage that cost an estimated $45 billion to repair. Snow in October led to massive power outages in the Middle Atlantic States. Record rainfalls in the Northeast were coupled with droughts in Texas. Then there was hurricane Irene wreaking havoc up and down the east coast. Here in central Pennsylvania we felt the aftershocks of an earthquake near Washington DC.

While I am not a meteorologist, I play golf with guys from AccuWeather. Based on those credentials, I forecast more extreme weather events in 2012.

Twelve: Red Sox Fire Bobby Valentine – If you are not a baseball fan, you don’t care about this prediction. But, in the spirit of mixing in fun with very serious matters, I predict Red Sox nation will quickly lose their appetite for their new manager who tries to make the game sound a lot harder than it is. For a lifelong Yankee fan, this will be fun to watch.

My wife, Rebecca Durst, owns Rinaldo’s Barbershop located in downtown State College. Perhaps her name rings a bell since she has been quoted in media outlets far and wide as reporters have swarmed the area covering the alleged Penn State child molestation scandal.

For those of you for whom this is front page news every day, please bear with me while I offer a short summary for the more than 25% of readers in my Linked-in network living in Europe or Asia. In a nutshell, a state grand jury issued a twenty-three page report earlier this month documenting 40 counts of sexual abuse against young boys by a former Penn State football coach. The one receiving the most attention is reported to have occurred in 2002 when a then graduate assistant football coach is alleged to have witnessed the former coach sodomizing a young boy in a shower at the football facilities.

Acknowledging my bias, my wife is not only the prettiest barber you have ever seen, she is also a great manager. She owns the open admiration from her seven chair team that covers both genders and ranges in age from twenty years her junior to twenty years her senior.

She made a compelling observation which I pass on for your reflection and comment. Becky asserts that, had just one person in the five link chain of command been a woman, they would have done the right thing. The five links included a graduate assistant coach (male) who reported a young boy being sodomized in a shower to the head football coach, also male. The coach, in turn reported to the athletic director (male) who conferred with the vice president of business (male) who oversaw campus police. Finally, the vp for business reported the incident to the university president, also male.

Reportedly, no one asked about the victim to determine his welfare or what kind of help could have been provided. No one asked the alleged perpetrator to explain why he was alone in a shower with a young boy (a fact he does not dispute) around 10 pm on a Friday evening. And finally, no one contacted the authorities as is required by law.

What is your opinion? Would there have been a different outcome had just one of the five links in that chain been a woman?

I live in State College, Pennsylvania, a small town that is the home to a huge university: Penn State. Until the events of recent weeks State College was known as Happy Valley.

Everything changed earlier this month with media outlets all over the country, even some in Europe, covering the alleged child sex abuse scandal made public in a twenty-three page Grand Jury report. Forty charges of sex abuse have been lodged against a former Penn State assistant football coach ranging back to 1994.

The one receiving the most attention is reported to have occurred in 2002 when a then graduate assistant football coach is alleged to have witnessed the former coach sodomizing a young boy in a shower at the football facilities.

There are different accountings of what happened next, who reported what to whom and the actions, or inactions, that ensued. One thing is clear: no one reported the alleged incident to the police as is required by law.

As a result, the president and head football coach were terminated. This was preceded by two other administrators involved in the handling of the incident, the athletic director and the vice president for finance, being arraigned on charges of perjury and failure to report the incident.

Knowing I live in State College, some readers of this blog have asked for my views. If anything, the Penn State scandal could serve as a case study, albeit a tragic one, of violating the principles of good organizational structure. In Rainmakers, Closers & Other Sales Myths (chapter twelve), I write that every organization has a formal structure that illustrates reporting lines: who reports to whom. Many also have an informal, or shadow, structure where the true reporting relationships are practiced and culture revealed. The congruence between the formal structure and what is actually practiced can be read as a symptom of organizational health.

It was widely understood and written that Penn State allowed its football coach to operate autonomously. The formal structure would show him reporting to the athletic director, and the AD in turn reporting to the president. It seems, however, the coach reported to no one. One celebrated example occurred in 2004 when the AD and president tried to coax the coach into retirement. He was seventy-eight then. The coach was allowed to continue for another seven years until his inglorious end.

One lesson that may be learned from this tragedy it is to look at the congruence of your formal and informal organizational structures. Ideally, they should be one in the same.

Vince Coultis, Training & Development Manager for McClatchy Newspapers, had an interesting Linkedin post recently:

Skill power versus Will power. Or can’t versus won’t behavior. How do you coach for this when performance is the issue?

Vince’s inquiry fit so perfectly into our Adaptable Leader Coaching Formula that I had to reply. I received both an “Excellent!” from Vince and his permission to use the topic for a post at Dr. Tilden’s Sales Prescription. Here is the essence of what I wrote:

Performance = Ability X Motivation.

As I write in Rainmakers, Closers & Other Sales Myths, ability is comprised of both talents and skills. The former are accidents of birth, like being a tall basketball player or a competitive salesperson. A pure talent cannot be altered by coaching any more than a basketball player can get taller. Skills are the second component of ability. These can be acquired through coaching and practice. For a basketball player passing is a skill anyone can learn. Similarly, most any salesperson can be taught and learn presentation skills. The core takeaway here is that, to achieve maximum performance, a leader should recruit for talents and coach for skills.

The formula is purposely multiplicative. We all recall from grade school math that if you multiply a factor by zero, zilch is what you get. Thus, if you have an able salesperson with no motivation, you get zero performance in return.

But, let’s look more closely at how motivation factors into performance. Psychologists would argue that only the individual can motivate himself. The role of a leader, then, is confined to providing rewards. There are two kinds: Extrinsic and Intrinsic. The former are tangible, countable, and usually bankable. Research shows that extrinsic rewards only work when you want faster results. Alfie Kohn (1993) refers to this as the Great Jackass Fallacy. Imagine a picture of a carrot on the end of a stick. Now complete the picture. What’s chasing the carrot?

Thus, if your team is comprised of jackasses, dangling bonuses will get them to run harder. But, if what you need are human “work smart” kinds of behaviors like problem solving, analysis and creativity, intrinsic rewards are required. The answer puts most leaders in the largely misunderstood realm of intrinsic rewards: how to meet the different interpersonal needs of each team member. The good news on intrinsic rewards is that once a leader figures them out, they can have an enormous impact on performance with a nearly negligible cost.

How to customize and deliver meaningful intrinsic rewards is the central topic of our Adaptable Leader Program. http://www.tildensst.com/course-descriptions

Genius is complicated. No one illustrated that better than Steve Jobs. On the one hand, he was a brilliant designer, a charismatic leader, and an electrifying presenter. Some have compared his genius to that of Einstein and his impact on our culture to Guttenberg.

On the other hand, he was eccentric, unkind and duplicitous. He once ordered a calla lilly and a piano for his Manhattan hotel room. He didn’t play the piano. His evaluations of people and their work had no middle ground and fell into just two categories. Both were labeled with expletives. Although he promised not to compete with Apple when he started NeXT, he pirated key Apple people. (Businessweek, Steve Jobs, 1955-2011)

It should be no surprise, then, that Steve Jobs is difficult to interpret when we look to him for lessons on selling. Steve Jurveston, who worked with Jobs at both Apple and NeXT, writes that Jobs found selling boring. Ross Perot who invested $20 million in NeXT and served on its board, once chastised Jobs and NeXT for not listening closely to its customers. Jobs responded by walking out of the meeting. That move prompted Perot to ask if Jobs’ gesture meant he could get his money back. (Businessweek, Steve Jobs, 1955-2011)

But, boy, could Jobs sell. Part of his genius was his natural charisma. True, I am the author of Rainmakers, Closers & Other Sales Myths wherein I claim salespeople are made and not born. But, I also offer the caveat that
natural gifts, like charisma, serve a salesperson just like a great vertical
leap serves a basketball or volleyball player.

Jobs had charisma in spades. So much so that his co-workers coined the phrase Reality Distortion Field to describe his uncanny ability to inspire an audience, any audience, to look beyond the realities of facts and share his excitement about an idea.

But Jobs ability to sell was not limited to natural gifts. He also worked on his presentation skills. The more he presented the better he got. He understood the power of stories, and as Seth Godin writes in All Marketers Are
Liars, he knew that facts don’t sell. Stories do. His slides consisted only
of images; no bullet points, no words.

If we whittle selling down to the core steps of first understanding a client’s needs and then proposing solutions, Jobs may have been unconventional at the former and brilliant at the latter. Perhaps he was one of those once in a lifetime geniuses who was able to intuit what customers want without even them knowing it. As he once said, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they
want until you show them.”

In recent days, I have been preparing career development materials for school children in Lithuania. The program is supported by the European Union and the grant was won by our Lithuanian colleagues at Versse Consulting whom we certified in SST®: Successful Selling to Type. The people at Versse were familiar with my academic background in career development1 and invited me to participate in the project. I am grateful for the opportunity.

We begin the program by debunking popular career myths, one of which is that career related decisions are irreversible. In looking to illustrate a career pattern with twists and turns I chose Steve Jobs. Like everyone, I was saddened by his passing earlier this week.

Many credit Steve Jobs with inventing the personal computer with Apple II. He was 21. While CEO of Apple he also developed the Macintosh which introduced Windows and the computer mouse. But, as he told it at a 2005 commencement ceremony, his career then took on unexpected ups and downs. Like many, I found his words inspiring:

“I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.”
Steve Jobs, 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University

The world is a better place because Steve Jobs recognized that, after being fired by the company he founded, that he still loved what he did. He picked himself up, focused on those passions and went on to make even bigger and better contributions.
We will be asking students to reflect on their career passions and how to express them. It is a good question for everyone.

1 For my dissertation I researched career development in college students and helped develop a standardized career maturity assessment.

The Internet Changed Everything. Did It Make It Better?
A common lament I hear from sales executives these days is that it is hard to get younger salespeople to pick up the phone and make a call. They are too accustomed to e-mail. That and the ten year observance of September 11, 2001, prompted me to think about where this generation of salespeople was on that terrible day. The world was quite different ten years ago.
There were no social media. Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and YouTube did not exist. We did not have smart phones nor computer tablets like the i-Pad.
Go back another ten, a total of twenty years, and the internet was in its infancy. People exchanged information face-to-face or by telephone calls. There was no e-mail, texting, online shopping, blogs or search engines. Newspapers and books were read in hard copy.
Bill Gates was right when he observed, “The internet changes everything.” Here are some thoughts on changes in how we work in general and do selling in particular:
 Work used to be a place you went. Today, many workers, especially salespeople, “telecommute” and work from their homes. I am among them.
 Workers used to take breaks together, hang-out around the water cooler or grab a beer after work. With more telecommuting, there is less socializing around work.
 Everyone who sends an e-mail knows there is a line marked cc to include other people. How many know “cc” stands for “carbon copy”, an old practice of making duplicates on flimsy carbon paper and physically sending them to other recipients. Office practices like this meant a lot more paper being filed and toted around by salespeople.
 The vehicles of business used to be telephone and physical mail. If we needed to communicate with a client or a prospect, we either wrote a letter and mailed it or called them on the telephone. Today, most communication is done by e-mail.
 It used to be at the end of the work day people went home and rarely heard from co-workers or customers again until the next day. Today, most workers carry electronic tethers and are accessible around the clock by e-mail or mobile phone messages.
 And then there is PowerPoint. Although it was founded in the late 80s, it wasn’t ubiquitous until the mid – 90s when Microsoft bundled it in its Office Suite. Some say that blaming bad presentations on PowerPoint is analogous to blaming bad writing on the pen. But, let’s acknowledge that there is a lot of really bad PowerPoint out there and many use it as a teleprompter crutch.
Are these changes for the better? Do we have more time? Do we have better relationships with our clients? With our co-workers? Are our sales presentations better? I think not. What are your thoughts.