Secret Sauce of Enterprise Sales

Summer has arrived and the first half of the year for your business was either great, good, or just OK. As the leader you know that revenue is a form of a lagging indicator, and so for many businesses the third quarter is a time where your leading indicator (first time sales calls with prospects) can drop off a cliff. While you still have the marketing and sales teams working on the top of the funnel this natural drop can afford you a time to revisit your sales habits and processes. 

We recently worked on this exact issue for a company, and below is a window into what we built for them. Feel free to share it with your company and tweak it as you see fit. There isn't much intellectual property in sales processes, however, dedicated practice on the right actions of listening and communicating appears to be a timeless pursuit for the best. 

Just like Steph Curry's pregame workout and his practice sessions, they are re-mark-able.

The very best pursue all types and forms of practice and they are re-lent-less in that pursuit.

If your company wants a customized practice plan or a practice partner, just let us know.

Our General Bias to Take Into Enterprise Sales CallsYou (our prospect) have been specifically selected:

• This isn't a shotgun talk-to-everyone exercise.
• We have spent years working on this innovation.
• It is our mission to serve people and company's like you. 
• We have done a lot of research about the typical needs of a company like yours, and are here to see how your individual needs may be similar or different to others.
• We have a series of questions to ask you at the beginning.

What is the outcome that your company really really cares about?

• What are the most important flags that everyone in your company has to salute?
• What are you telling the world you are all about?
• How are you getting to that point?
• What are the obstacles getting in your way to getting to that point?
• Is it possible that our solution can help you get far down the road of obtaining the outcome that your company has stated is most important?
• It's not enough to identify pain, you have to identify and solve for a really really big important pain and be able to measure it relative to other pains or they will not move in your direction in the time frames needed to be successful.
• Most deals die here and we are more than happy to identify a big problem for them, put a bow on it and leave them sitting by the side of the road with that problem because it helps us keep our margins up, especially when we are innovating.
• Our Worksheet is used here to clearly spell out the $$ benefits and that can also be socialized inside the customers C-Suite to validate the decision to align with us and stop aligning with the chemical companies.

If we can't kill this idea....then you should move forward with it....the key issue is how many and over what time period (WHEN)

• We make machines.
• Machines take time to build.
• We like to time it right for both of our benefits so.....LET's PUT ON OUR PLANNING HATS.
• When are we making them and when are you receiving them and when are you paying us for this?
• We also have a training and protocol timeline that we share with you that insures proper use of the equipment for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. 

The four legs under our platform are:

• The $$ it saves you over a 5 year period. (THE WORKSHEET SHOWS THIS IN DETAIL)
• The efficiency it gives you in XYZ 
• The leverage it gives you in the marketplace as a ABC
• The reduction in employee lawsuit exposure you gain by DEF 

The secret sauce behind the process

• We use the questions at the beginning to get them talking and to feel like they are special with a unique problem that we care a lot about and focused on (picture being sick and meeting the right doctor).
• We use the worksheet to formalize the amount of pain they are in and the amount of benefit we can deliver and to pivot to the WHEN conversation.
• We use the flank of making the machine to get them to talk to us about timelines and budgets so we can efficiently plan as two businesses in alignment towards their stated goal early in the call.
• We are now brothers in arms fighting a common foe together and not vendor/customer. We need alignment to carry the day to get through all the hassles of making, delivering and maintaining the equipment and hitting their goals. 

Why/What/When White Paper

The above outlined process is an adaptation of our WHY/HOW/WHEN white paper on customer acquisition which you can access by clicking on the document or find it and other white papers on our website CONTENT page.

Enjoy the summer!

Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams (SIWT)

The shorter duration of sports teams seasons allow for more efficient research and we also find they correlate well with companies, non-profits, and families.

Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams (SIWT) is leading to the creation of a management process for coaches and businesses to implement. 

SIWT is for coaches and owners who believe the best teams are made when both the individual's and the team's needs are met. This dual goal takes leadership and management to a higher level, it's not for the lazy coach or boss.

Our first edition focused on Vulnerability. This edition we turn our focus to Following.

Secret Ingredient: Following

If the leader is an intermediary to a vision, then a follower in a team context is someone who agrees with that vision, and subjects themselves to the needs of others in order to reach the agreed upon target. This sounds easy, yet a series of subtle forces are at work undermining group success. Individuals are efficient at calculating their own cost benefit analysis of their time, level of engagement, and compensation needs as they seek to optimize their return on effort. 

The act of following while still thinking is a critical component that turns a group of people into a team. Today’s group efforts demand a fully engaged collective body where every person is thinking while they are following. Gone are the days of being able to blindly follow, now at a moment’s notice any member of the team may be called upon to lead. If they don’t have the vision in their mind, the outcomes will suffer. 

Great Following Trait #1: Stay close and Observe

Google may have replaced mentors as the best source of knowledge in general, but on a team the subtle needs and tricks to great performance are still passed on human to human. The closer you can stay to your immediate leader, the more they will pass along in either word or deed.  First year cadets at West Point are taught to observe and adapt as they start the tightly manicured 4-year matriculation. There will be distractions everywhere at work, from coworkers, to trade shows, to all-hands meetings.  Navigate all these with discretion and observe how your boss behaves and mirror it.

Great Following Trait #2: Anticipate

Some of the best teams in the world come in pairs, and seldom is that pair splitting each task 50/50. They often deploy a divide and conquer strategy with each one owning a series of duties and relying on the other to deliver on their stack. As the team builds beyond a pair, a collaborate-to-innovate strategy can start to evolve. It is at this point that the ability to anticipate the needs of others plays a key role in how great followers enable successful teams.  At the root of anticipation is empathy.  Empathy requires setting aside your thoughts and seeing the world through the eyes of another. New members of work teams who seek to serve the needs of the group first will not stay at the bottom of the totem pole for long. 

Great Following Trait #3: Be Comfortable with Conflict

Universities may talk a tough game when it comes to deadlines, but ultimately the student is paying for the knowledge. In recent decades the school administrators have a consistent record of caving to student and parent demands. The workplace is a different story, the customer is a fickle and petulant king, and this can turn even the nicest boss into a frustrated time-constrained leader with very challenging demands.

“Stop what you’re doing and get this done today!  It has to get done now!”

What happened to:  “How are you, is everything OK in your world? When you get a minute could you step in my office to discuss our latest cool project that you will love?”

Anyone who has worked for even six months knows tension and conflict arrive via phone, email, and text at a moment’s notice. Having a series of communication tools to work with others during times of duress is a game changer. Being able to work with conflict when you are in a low power situation starts with being able to frame what you are hearing, and then nailing what you can offer to the solution. When people disagree on the solution it is key for the good follower to grab the similarities that exist amid the differences, and then look for a good moment to share your findings. Master this trait as a follower, and your leaders will take note and your responsibilities will increase.

A View into Our Future

Tomorrow’s leaders will be challenged to get a population of individuals to buy into the need to follow as we have defined it. Those that can sell the benefits of supplanting the self for the group and create outcomes that feed the entire team will find that word of mouth among the members will keep a steady stream of applicants at their door. Very few enterprises scale without more people, and people having a good time while winning is contagious. We all want to be on that team. The question being asked is are you willing to follow long enough to get there?

The New Employee

We would like to highlight a specific moment when the individual is new to a team or company.  One's ability to assimilate quickly appears to have a strong correlation with later success. 

Here is a quick guide for you or a friend to use when they are new:

Are You a Pirate or a Cowboy?

There was a romantic comedy that had a bit of a cult following in the early 90’s by the name of “The Princess Bride” with a mythical character that was known as the Dread Pirate Roberts.  He had a habit of telling his captives, “good night, sleep well for I will most likely kill you in the morning.”  It was all an act, but he later explained that establishing a healthy sense of fear in people was the easiest way to lead them.

Another movie that included people using a long journey to learn a little about themselves and leadership was "City Slickers" with Billy Crystal and Jack Palance. Palance is the sage cowboy who leads Crystal and his pals through a search for their one thing while managing a cattle drive. He used a group effort to help each individual find their role, and in the process the group became a team.

Which leads us back to our question: which one are you and which environment do you prefer? A pirate ship or a cattle drive? Both are journeys, both have codes, and both have success that they can point to as validation for their way of life. 

Yet the two environments have stark differences. The pirate ship is a cauldron for bullies and the chief bully is the captain. On a pirate ship you are waging war both internally and externally at all times. There is blood everywhere and the sea is full of losers who have walked the plank. 

The funny thing about our work environments is that many people will tolerate bully behavior at work from a high functioning a..hole. The crazy designer, the coder who treats people poorly, or the sales person who crushes quota and everyone that comes in her path. Worse yet is the CEO who uses the term “radical candor” as a smoke screen to berate and belittle people who aren’t “all-in” at the company.

The Hard Thing About Innovating

Geoffrey Moore is a best selling author of books that focus on disruptive innovations and technology. His best seller is "Crossing the Chasm" and it addresses the issue of going from the early adopter category of customers to the bigger section of buyers labeled “pragmatists.” Recently, he posted a short piece on LinkedIn about this still pressing issue for all innovative companies. I posted a question to his post and as fortune would have it, he responded with an answer. Our interaction and his post is compiled here in a PDF.   To read directly on LinkedIn click here.

The interchange gave us confidence that we are in alignment with a great thinker and adviser to the CEO’s of companies like Microsoft and Salesforce. It also allowed for some reflection on just how much the phrase “sales and marketing” is out of date. Professionals used to call the category of customer acquisition Sales and Marketing.  Sales was first and Marketing was next, second, or last depending on the company.  Sales and its people were the heroes.

​In the past ten years the script has flipped and we now live in a world of marketing and sales. In our world the word marketing really means Thought Leadership Marketing (TLM). TLM for some is crazy, because their marketing is all about sounds and movies and clicks and moving a human through a process like a sheep about to be sheered. Those processes matter mostly for very small dollar purchases.

Our clients provide goods and services to enterprise customers with multiple decision makers who all have different professional biases and disciplines that they own in their roles as CFO, General Counsel, or COO. These professionals don’t make decisions based on catchy headlines and short videos, they read and analyze data and facts. They want to see case studies and interviews with people like them who are faced with similar issues.

These C-level buyers respond to thought leadership, and it is through this medium that you can then earn an audience and begin your sales process. The two processes are different, but they fit nicely with each other when designed correctly. It starts with a thought leadership marketing story-line that your company produces and it moves to an enterprise sales process which focuses on alignment, belief, and urgency.

If you know of a company that is innovating and struggling with the chasm as Moore describes we have a Thought Leadership Customer Acquisition Program that is made for building the bridge that leads your products and services into the large pool of customers that are the pragmatists. 

Questions That Have Been Making an Impact

One of the benefits of being a consultant is that we are in a lot of different “team” rooms and, like the honey bee, pick up lots of different pollen/ideas from each team. We have noticed that the right question can really stimulate engagement, creativity, and accountability. Here are a few questions that stood out as being particularly effective.
​

• What are we telling ourselves that is true, that might not be true?
  
  • This helps you get to the bottom of some confirmation bias and helps you contingency plan.
• What came to you while you were away?
  
  • This helps people who are recreating (which is vital) reflect on their reflections and then helps you study how that reflection might be helpful to the unit.
• What could be true in one year?
  
  • This is a vision casting question that seeks to flush out doubt and also call a group of people higher.

We hope they help stimulate and foster dialogue that leads to positive actions.

Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams

Six years ago Sara and I started Banyan Tree Strategies to help people build re-mark-able businesses and we are thankful for its success. In the midst of our work we started to notice a correlation between what we were doing for companies and our past experiences as professional athletes and more recently as youth sports coaches. 

What was our big revelation?
Everyone wants to be on a winning team and nobody wants to be tagged as not being a team player.

OK. We get it, big deal, everyone knows that already.

Then why is it so hard to repeat as a winner, and why do most teams fail?

We took what we are learning from CEO’s and are applying it ranging from college coaches, to people coming out of college looking to grow their networks, to 6th grade lacrosse coaches. Four times a year we will share our insights called “The Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams,” a topic we have touched on at various moments in our Banyan Tree Branches & Roots Newsletter.

We hope our research can help you in your efforts to build winning teams in all facets of your life.

These are the themes we are currently following:
•    The coach’s pursuit of collective excellence
•    How small societies impact performance
•    The evolving role of the captain

Collective Excellence 

There are many noble pursuits for a coach at the beginning of the season and we hardly ever bump into one who is volunteering their time in the hopes of causing a kid to quit the sport. However, if we were to vote on one of the hardest goals to obtain, we would put achieving collective excellence above going undefeated and winning the all-city title. 

Our definition of collective excellence has its roots in the work of John Wooden and those who also seek to build a personal relationship with each player in the joint pursuit of the team’s goals. The ability of the coach to build trust with the player, to such an extent that the player can agree to the role the coach has constructed for that season is crucial. It's part sales pitch and part plea for support and trust.

Each season is as an opportunity for the coach to have a scouting report done on themselves, a book as it were. It answers the question, how do we beat this coach? Scouting reports are common on players: what is the book on that guy? 

• “Can’t go to his left”
• “Can’t lay off the high heat”
• “Easy to get riled up and then is done for the game”

A coach should also want to know what “the book” is on them at this point in their career, and then work the next season to improve.  So what is the book on you right now?

The coach who trusts his or her team enough to be vulnerable with them should be well on their way to existing in a state of consensual interdependence with the rest of the coaching staff and the players.  We wrote about this in one of our Thought Leadership Series pieces shown here. 

The pursuit of collective excellence begins with the coaching staff and then continues through to the players. If you can think of a team you were on that achieved this, please share with us as we continue to build out stories on this topic.

How Small Societies Impact Performance

We first heard this term small societies from UNC women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance in a talk he gave at the What Drives Winning Conference in 2015. 

It was a scant reference at the beginning of the talk (minute 1:15), but for geeks like us, it was cause for research. Dorrance is a coach in pursuit of collective excellence. He is building a cumulative chest of wisdom on the topic of human collaboration in the pursuit of putting a ball in a net and caring about each other in the process. His research led him to discover Cesar Luis Menotti of Argentina who had the high pressure job of being that country's national soccer team coach. 

It was Menotti who started talking about the teams within the teams, calling them small societies when describing the relationships between the goalie and the fullbacks, the right midfielder with the center forward. It is similar to Metcalf’s law of networks and how intertwined our relationships can get. 

Our current learning is this: 
Consider looking at your team the same way you would look at this square. You know you are going to be asked, how many squares can you see? If a square is a small society that could exist on your team, how many can you see? Make a list of small societies for your team and then if you feel like it, share it with us. As the coach, you can’t advise and mentor what you can’t observe. 

We have reached out to Dorrance with no success to date. If you have a link to him, please let us know as we would love 15 minutes to have a conversation on his current thoughts.

Oh Captain, My Captain

No topic has captured our attention in the area of teams more in the past six months than the role of the Captain. Both Sara and I were captains of our high school and college teams. Both of us found it an arduous role to fill. In the decades since we have spoken to countless others who had similar experiences and were delighted to find that Sam Walker did years of research and published “The Captain Class.” 

His goal was to answer one of the most challenging questions in the history of sport: who are the best teams of all time? In all sports, in all time? Talk about a Mt. Everest goal. He also had a second goal. If he could make a claim that there was one class above the rest, did they have any characteristics in common?

Turns out he could and there was. It was that they had a certain type of Team Captain. He then went on to identify that those captains had seven characteristics in common. 

This was pure catnip for us and led us to interview as many college, high school, and youth sport coaches we could and ask, if this is true, then how can you incorporate identifying potential captains and then developing them as part of your program? 

What we heard and how coaches are changing what they are doing in response to the data is encouraging.

• Coaches are talking less
• Coaches don't have to pretend to get mad to get players to hustle
• Coaches have more time to plan and think
• The players can lead themselves

We will continue to review this effort in this section of the publication. Here is a copy of what we send to coaches prior to our conversations with them, feel free to send it to any coach you know and we would love their advice and comments. 

Thank you so much for your readership and engagement with our research on building and maintaining winning teams. Winning together is a jump for joy moment and we think those are worth the blood, sweat, and toil that goes into being collectively excellent. We will be back to you in the middle of May with our latest insights that we glean from our network of awesome contributing coaches and leaders. 

The First Pivot of the Year

Welcome to the middle of the first quarter of 2019, which for many business owners is a vital check-in moment. You may have been planning for a great first quarter of the year since the end of last summer, and now that future is your present. What is going the way you planned, what isn’t, and why? 

We spent the last 45 days traveling, visiting companies, and attending a few conferences with clients. We are happy to share our insights on the three themes we are going to follow this year as we seek to help our community run re-mark-able businesses.

Themes for 2019
•    Thought Leadership and its impact on your business
•    Customer acquisition frameworks
•    CEO leadership challenges 

What is New in Thought Leadership

Email continues to be the killer app for developing and maintaining a respected position with your clients, customers and prospects. Recent data shows that enterprise and individual customers spend the vast majority of their time reading and communicating inside of an email application. 

What does this mean for you?
It means that unless you have a business which really wants to attract a customer that it doesn’t know and offer them a commodity (think owning a McDonald's franchise) you don’t really need to spend a ton of money on social media. Your best course of action is to have a well-developed email communication plan that integrates with your website and sales team.  

Key Insight
The frequency of your email communication should depend on the type of service or product you are delivering. It can range from a travel service emailing you multiple times a week, to an estate planning law firm that shares its findings once a quarter. If you want our advice on what your cadence should be, click here. 

What is A Customer Acquisition Framework?

Consultants can bring diversity of thought to a company, they also bring new terminology that at first glance may not make sense. We use a customer acquisition framework (CAF) to describe how a business wants a potential customer to learn about, and then accept its offer. It might be called sales and marketing and in other places it’s called marketing and sales. Regardless, the biggest change we have noticed in this area are the options available to your company relative to just five years ago. That is why it is one of our themes for 2019. It might make sense for you to revisit your strategy.

In 1995 the phone and the fax machine were the money makers, and having a toll free number was a big deal. You might have had a marketing department, but you didn’t know what worked and what didn’t and the magazine ad salespeople were really happy about that.

Today marketing executives can show up to a meeting with real data that tracks and predicts future behavior by your target customers. 

What does this mean for you?
It means you have more leverage with your marketing dollars and your sales team. Just ten years ago you were still guessing with your marketing dollars and the sales reps could hold you hostage with the relationships they initiated. 

Key insight
In the House Tour image below think through how far you could have a potential customer get without the help of a sales person? As an owner you have an incentive to get them as far through the house as you can. Get this right and your cost of sales will plummet and your profitability will rise. 

CEO Leadership Challenges

Somewhere between Salt Lake City and Grand Junction this January while climbing a scary mountain pass in a four wheel drive it came to us that a way to look at the CEO’s job is as follows:  

To determine how much stress the balance sheet of the company and the people that work for it can handle at this time in the company's life. 

You may have a different view of it, or a different way to say it that works for you and we would love to hear from you about how you see it, but humor us for a minute.

It appears at times that even at some pretty large companies that the only person who is really thinking about the future of the entire enterprise is the CEO. Everyone else is in their department looking for more resources, and hopefully in the words of Peter Drucker, focused on the next most important task.

What does this mean for you?
It means you need to be relentless in your pursuit of what is true from your direct reports because they may have an inherent bias to keep you on a consistent drip of flattery and fluff.  It also means that having a board of directors that can help you think about the company from the outside is vital.

Questions a good board can help you wrestle with are:
•    How much debt should we be working with now to grow the business? 
•    Where are your next threats coming from?
•    What innovations are going to allow you to increase your margins? 
•    Where is your current leadership team in their own personal life cycles?  

The rub is that building and maintaining a productive board of directors is a challenge. Too often it is such a hassle that you don’t even have one. CEO’s can often feel like the coach of a professional sports team. The players on the field are your employees, the fans in the stands are the customers, and up in the owner’s box sits the board of directors. Where does the coach stand? Sometimes they stand alone.

Key Insight
Ask yourself the following question: What is the company telling itself right now that we want to be true, that may not actually be true? Many department heads will be talking about growth because they know that is what everyone wants to hear. The challenge is that if the company doesn’t manage its balance sheet and time the growth correctly outside forces can end up owning the business. You may have a growth mandate, but try as we might most of us can’t make water go uphill, so back up your mandate with facts and processes you can trust and measure. This rigor and dialogue can save your business.

See You at the End of Q1

That’s it for now, thank you for allowing us to drop into your mailbox six to eight times a year with our insights from the road. We love helping interesting people build re-mark-able businesses that “never stop growing.” Email us here if you want to start a conversation. 

​Dancing With Your Best Self in 2019

During the biggest gap week of the year we send you our warmest thoughts and pledge to continue our quest to write great content on how to bring your best self and team in 2019.

An Enlightened Breakfast

Recently I had breakfast with a friend and he exclaimed:

“Sanders you have to watch the movie “Free Solo” about the guy who climbed El Capitan at Yosemite without a rope! It is the most amazing physical and mental personal achievement I have ever seen.” 

My response was:

“Awesome, I will go see it.”

Then a challenging notion came to mind and I made an assertion: 

“You know, when you try and to climb it with 2 to 100 people together is when the whole plan and challenge changes.”

 
Free Solo
We ended up having a great dialogue about the differences in trying to lead a company where you are telling people to be their best, and yet are not sharing and teaching how they should work together to accomplish the mission of creating a remarkable customer experience. 

Looking back on six years of running Banyan Tree Strategies, much of what we have been sharing with you has been about that gap or transition. The leader's challenge of teaching people to go from the one, to the few, to the many while achieving collective excellence.

Learning how to work together well is described in the second layer of John Wooden’s pyramid of success, going from best self to the best team. Some relevant recent work has been done by a group of Wooden’s players and fellow professors at UCLA. It is called “The Pyramid of Teaching Success in Sport.” 

Wooden’s challenging call to coaches lingers in this pyramid when he said, 

“You haven’t taught, until they have learned.”

We Are Splitting Branches & Roots Into Two Publications 

•    One will be focused on business owners and continue our eight times a year cadence.
•    The other will look at the secret ingredients of winning teams and be published quarterly.

Building A Re-Mark-Able Business

Banyan Tree Strategies serves business owners who believe that growing a re-mark-able business is a worthy pursuit. Our content is for owners who want to know more about how to lead their people, position their services correctly, and win the new business they desire. Our pledge is that by engaging us you will build a business that can double in size every five years.

We will follow four themes to help your business grow. 

•    The effective use of thought leadership to drive new client engagement.  
•    Customer acquisition frameworks that are working currently and how to scale a sales force.
•    Managing transitions with key people and potentially the sale of a business unit.
•    Challenges facing the C-suite and how to manage and lead your direct reports.

The Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams

The quarterly content will be for people who believe that building and maintaining small societies (teams) is interesting. It is for people who want to know more about what makes certain teams different than others. We hope that by reading our thoughts on teams that you will be empowered to be a better teammate and leader. 

The non-profit we founded in 2005 and still run today is focused on serving youth sports coaches. We will share with you what we are doing to serve these coaches and you will get an early look at what we are building to allow them to be better at their craft. 

You will receive our email on February 15th, May 15th, August 15th, & November 15th and our goal is for it to be a less than five-minute read and worth the time. 

Our view is that everyone is a coach to someone and that the best ones loved to be coached. However, it is quite a challenge to go from individual learning to group learning and this is where John Wooden’s quote “you haven’t taught until they have learned” leaves many of us challenged and wanting. 

We look forward to sharing the journey of 2019 together and appreciate your readership and advice along the way.

Drew & Sara

P.S. Our first offering for coaches in 2019 is going to focus on what to share with someone when they don’t make the team. Any thoughts you have on this topic are welcome. 

Why It Matters to Let Your Readers SCAN, READ, and STUDY Your Content

In this edition we are going to focus on how people are currently processing new information and how you might position your offerings. 

For illustrative purposes let's look at our topic through the eyes of Rupert Bear of the fictional town of Nutwood in England. 

The Rupert books teach us how to position your content to a new potential customer. Below we will compare how a young reader and a new customer might have a few things in common.

These books have a personal connection for me as my mother loves the comics, and upon returning from England she always had a new Rupert Bear book for me to enjoy. 

The SCAN - Sitting with mom and having her read to you while you look at the pictures

The Young Reader: Rupert Bear is well  positioned for the earliest of children. The colors in the book are attractive and each page has four scenes that can be understood without words. Picture reading this to a three year old. You are snuggled up on the coach reading aloud the bold titles and pointing to the scenes. The child is taking it all in and scanning.

The New Customer: When writing for an audience that is busy and may or may not be that interested in your offering, it is wise to allow them a chance to be able to digest some portion of knowledge from a quick scan. This allows you to benefit from their innate curiosity and potentially earn the chance to have them read what you have written.

The READ - Reading with Dad and learning how to sound it out

The Young Reader:  The next stage where Rupert works well for your growing child is when they are now learning how to sound things out. You are again snuggled up on the couch and these familiar pictures are there to help the child read the captions (which conveniently rhyme.) The meter and pace of the experience is well suited for the child, they are on their way to learning a key life skill, the joy of reading.

The New Customer: After the new customer has scanned your writing and chosen to learn more, you still want to allow them the chance to read only a little and be smarter than they were before. Give them a framework such as "here is the scoop and the skinny on this topic." They don’t have time yet to move forward with you, but you will earn points with them if you teach them something relevant quickly. We advise doing this with bold titles and pulled-out captions. 

The STUDY - Reading on your own for comprehension and action

The Young Reader:  At six or seven the child is reading the writing at the bottom of the page and they now have years of interacting with the characters and the story lines. The parents are happy to pick up the latest Rupert Book that can travel with the child and know that thebook will consume time and attention with all the positive outcomes that accompany reading. 

The New Customer: The holy grail of business writing is to have a person of influence get past the first two steps of scanning and reading and actually study what you have to say on a topic. These are the people that make budgets, decide on purchases and lead others. The long term rewards of having them think with you and potentially learn from your deep insight are significant. You also benefit by not being there in front of them. They don’t have the distraction of dialogue, they are alone and have time to think. Get this part right and you are on your way to mutual success. 

The Fastest 105 Days of the Year

Welcome to the early fall reset from the team at Banyan. 

Wait, isn’t it still the beginning of August?  Why are we talking about the fall? 

The answer lies in the nuanced tension that exists between our weather-defined seasons and our local school districts ever-changing calendar. Over the past decade school has gone from starting after Labor Day to early or mid-August in much of the country. 

Thus begins a 105 day period of the year that takes us right up to Thanksgiving. From our experience this fast fall finish is chock full of commerce and commotion. 

Here are a few of our ideas and tips for you to consider in the different theaters of your life.​

YOU

We advise people to create a word for each calendar year that can act like a north star. If your word got lost in the fragmentation of summer, considering puling it out and reorienting your heading. Jon Gordon does a nice job outlining this here.

Right below that vision-crafting word sits a series of goals which can often be tied to a personal mission or quest. 

What is possible for you in the following areas in the next 105 days?

•    Self
•    Marriage
•    Children
•    Extended Family
•    Work
•    Community Service
•    Recreation

An insight we have benefited from in recent years is that we can’t do it all, and that we are not proficient when we switch between too many tasks at once. Consider pulling out our task organizing template and sit down with a trusted friend or spouse and prioritize your mission critical projects.  If you need a listening buddy, email us and we would be happy to lend you an ear.

YOU AT WORK

Hopefully you kissed some of the joy of summer as it flew by, put the memories in a jar, and blessed them with gratitude. Being able to do this, regardless of how full your jar is can be vital as you shift your focus to the fall. 

IF YOU HAVE A BOSS:
Put yourself in their shoes and think through how they are looking at the next 18 months of their life. Understanding begins with observation, and if you are looking for a primer to help you in this area consider using our mapping your boss template.


IF YOU ACQUIRE CUSTOMERS:
If you acquire customers for your company and have an annual sales number this time of year can be fantastic or frightful. Careful pipeline and funnel management will help you decide where to allocate your most precious asset: your time. 

Here are a few questions for you to review:

•    Can the prospect live without your offering now?
•    If they have determined they can’t live without your offering, do they have the dollars budgeted for this year or next?
•    After they have become a customer, who is going to be your internal champion of your offering for the first 18 months?
•    What are the chances that internal champion leaves or gets promoted during those 18 months and do you have a backup person identified?
•    Within your pipeline, where are your gaps? Are you falling in love with your later stage deals that still have hair on them because you don’t like the rejection that exists in the early stages? Be careful of this trap at all times of the year, but especially right now.

IF YOU RUN A TEAM:
If you run a team or own the company, then you are most likely looking forward to getting back to full strength. The summer feels like you are 20% light as people take time off. 

If your metrics show you are behind it can be a difficult time for you. Part of you wants to make dramatic changes and only see the downside in your market and your people. 

Some business advisers suggest a strategy of tilting the table on your people in order to keep them paranoid and always on edge.

We have labeled this the Superbowl Myth because so many leaders try to emulate sports  when motivating their people. The challenge with this notion is that sports teams have off-seasons and athletes are typically playing for less than three years. They are in the entertainment industry, which is always looking for something new.  It is by definition transitional. 

In contrast, many companies are looking to build a relationship with a customer that is as long and as mutually beneficial as possible. A great way to increase the lifetime value of your customer is to have employees that are able to think creatively and in harmony with each other, and the customer.  They are constantly innovating together.

Consider setting up a thinking framework that allows you to see how you and your team are working with and dealing with tension. Are you only able to get things accomplished when you add so much pressure that it is like throwing a tiger in the room?  Or, do you have a heading established and are moving towards that heading with the pace and purpose that comes from everyone being on the same page with respects to the priorities?

Setting a goal and allowing the right amount of tension to build within a team is the leader's charge. Chances are your team is not trying to win one championship and then take three months off. You need to win every day.
​
Think through the game you are trying to get everyone to play, and then seek to enter into a state of consensual interdependence with your team to properly prioritize the work goals together. 

YOU AT PLAY

Steven Johnson TED Talk - The playful wonderland behind great inventions.

​If this summer taught us anything it is that the blending of science and art makes for an amazing cocktail of creativity in both settings.

With fall being such a season of production, we end with the suggestion that you allocate some daily time to whatever art distracts you the most.  No matter the form, consider building in some unstructured play to your day.

Don’t worry about accomplishment inside your art.  Do it for your soul. Watch what happens as things from the pursuit part of your life fall into place almost by accident as you are having fun. 

We wish you a great start to the fall, and will be back in October with more learning and observations. For more of our writings for business visit www.banyantreestrategies.com and for our writings for people visit www.drewsanders.com.

Confessions of a Glue Sniffer

Don't worry, we have not picked up a new bad habit, a recent trip to the library had me opening up a new book, and the combination of the adhesives and paper gave off a smell that made me smile.  If you can imagine that smell right now, then you might really enjoy this edition.

When it comes to summer reading, word of mouth seems important. We just don’t want to make a book purchase and end up with a dud. With that in mind this edition of Branches & Roots is focused on 12 book ideas for the 12 weeks of summer. We hope you find one of our selections interesting and that you find the time to read (or like many of us listen to the book) while the days are long and the nights are short.

We have divided up the recommendations into five categories: 

• You
• You with others
• Historical perspectives
• Futuristic perspectives
• Learning from the lives of others.

​Most of these books are not new but they all were worth the investment of time, money and enrichment a good book can bring.

YOU

Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono

De Bono has 57 books to his credit and at 85 years of age has spent a lifetime working on how humans think and communicate. Lateral Thinking is from 2015 and is an easy read, perfect for anyone who wants to balance the linear thinking taught in most schools or companies with a different discipline. 

If you have children or grandchildren that are middle school age or higher, de Bono’s concepts may be timely.

YOU and OTHERS

Friend of a Friend by David Burkus

Burkus is making a great contribution to the current generation of college graduates and in this brand new book does a proficient job in helping the reader realize how to look at their relationships. A key insight from the book is to think of yourself as not owning a network of people, rather, we are all embedded in an network of relationships which is always changing. 

We agree with his perspective and constantly attempt to seek ways to contribute to our network, and are consistently amazed by the outcomes. 

A new college graduate might benefit from this book. As an aside, we serve the college graduate community with our “How to Land a Killer Job” out of college course at www.drewsanders.com/courses.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

One Man's Meat by E.B. White

White, of “Charlotte’s Web” fame was a writer from the northeast who left Manhattan and moved to Maine to live on a small farm. He wrote about it for Harpers Weekly, and the collection of these essays “One Man’s Meat” has been in print for over 55 years.

This book is easy to have on the bed stand because the lifting is light in both subject matter and duration. Each essay is only 3-7 pages long. White’s reflections struck us as timeless. He is writing in the late 1930’s and into the early 40’s, a time of international tension. His efforts to run the farm and his ability to correlate those experiences into life for the reader amidst the current tension is applicable today.

If you aren’t sure the world is going to be around tomorrow, or know someone who is up in arms currently, this could be their perfect summer read.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

Heat-Moon’s writing could create the beginning of at least ten songs per page. His observations of people and places and their interdependence astound. What struck us about his telling of what he saw and heard while driving the United States in the 1970’s was the practicality of the American public. Put these observations through the lens of 40 years of history and it could give those in a current state of flux a reason for hope. The writing is robust, his angst is present, but not overpowering, and the historical insight into our countries people is refreshing. 

Provence, 1970 by Luke Barr

Luke Barr is the grandnephew of noted food writer M.F.K. Fisher. He stumbles across her journal of a trip to France in 1970 in a storage unit in Hayward, California and discovers that some of the people who changed food in America were all there together by chance. Julia Child and James Beard joined Fisher that winter. They were the leading voices in the American food world, and during that season in the South of France they charted a new course for cuisine. 

Barr sets the stage for the encounter with the touch that only a family member can, and the direct quotes from Fishers journal reveal her grace and strong perspective. This book might be for the foodie in your life who wants to be connected back to a historical moment that, according to the author, changed our habits even to this day.

FUTURISTIC PERSPECTIVES

Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday

Conspiracy is an uncomfortable book. It dives into the current events and legal battle between Peter Thiel and Gawker Media. The first and fourth amendments have been getting a thorough cleaning by the lawyers in this case, and the ramifications can impact us all. 

Not only is the legal battle of interest, the author is one of the leading influencers of young professionals and is an avid stoic. Holiday will be influencing professionals for decades with his growing following in the hundreds of thousands. 

Read it, don't read it, but our laws make our rules, and the people who seek power like to change our laws. Questions that come out of this book are challenging. Should we conspire? Is it a bad word?  

While this book is a look back at previous events, we view it as a look into our future, as the actions of a politically active billionaire in his 40’s might be viewed as a prologue. 

The Four by Scott Galloway 

Galloway is a successful early 50’s business school professor at NYU who also calls himself a serial entrepreneur. This book might be interesting to anyone who is using a smart phone, shopping online, socializing online, or searching online. Basically that is all of us. 

Here is the twist. Galloway, while giving us the cool details about the companies, then comes out and suggests that we the public and the U.S. government have been giving them a business pass. He suggests we need to keep them in check, that they have gotten too big and we need to channel our inner Teddy Roosevelt and break these behemoths up. 

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal - Tech Titans Tiptoe Towards Monopoly - touches exactly on this subject and the historical similarities of previous monopolies with these modern giants.  

Galloway likes to write things that make you ponder.  This book does just that. 

LEARNING FROM THE LIVES OF OTHERS

Boyd by Robert Coram

John Boyd is said to have changed the art of war in the sky. Author Robert Coram takes us deep into the mind and daily life of the famous fighter pilot turned airplane designer and Air Force pentagon politico. The historical look at how our government was assigning contracts and how the different branches of military were fighting for budget is an eye opener.

Another key learning from the book is the OODA loop that Boyd created and preached to all his followers. Observe, Orient, Decide, & Act was a matter of life and death for Boyd as a fighter pilot. He lived his extraordinary and chaotic life by the loop and the simple decision to do versus be as an Air Force officer. 

Military buffs and business leaders will enjoy this book.

Scalia Speaks by Antonin Scalia 

A medley of Antonin Scalia's speeches were compiled this year in the book "Scalia Speaks" and are presented by one of his sons. The chance to reflect on his life and his decisions is perfect during the summer. He thought well, wrote well, and loved people and America. 

Would we all be so lucky to live like Justice Scalia and to make the contribution we were meant to make? This book is another light read as you are taken to a variety of locations and you can read a speech at a siting. The subject matter is actually lighter than you might think coming from a Supreme Court Justice, and his wit keeps you turning the pages with ease. 

Personal History by Katherine Graham

This book is getting some fresh press with the success of the movie The Post with Meryl Streep playing Graham. Graham won a Pulitzer Prize for this book when it came out in 1998 and she died three years later. The 20 years have allowed her actions and leadership to come into a brighter light. History will be kind to Graham and she earned it. 

Some of our insights from the book are that leading is a selfless and selfish act at the same time. Leaders and their followers, when in sync, are in a state of consensual interdependence. We think learning from Graham will help anyone aspiring to take up the charge of leading others.  

Without Precedent by Joel Richard Paul  

The story of our country's beginnings and the lives of its leaders becomes more astounding as we stack decade upon decade on their thinking and actions. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton have been receiving much of the attention.

Yet the low cousin of Thomas Jefferson might be worth our attention. The author Joel Paul makes the case that our three branch system might not have existed if not for the strong will and mind of John Marshall. 

Marshall’s personal life and adventures are of interest, as are the feuds with President Jefferson as the courts grew from a group of traveling deciders into the keeper of the constitutional conscience. 

Anyone interested in the history of law and our countries founding will enjoy this book. 

​We will be back in July with more leadership and team building insights. Until then happy reading....or listening!

Encouragement, Failure, and Observing

Tick-tock, tick-tock, the clock keeps moving towards May 15th and the longer days and warmer evenings of late spring. The business calendar has many of us on planes, staying in hotels, and meeting with interesting people. The common questions are: 

What’s possible?
When can we get it done?
What’s next?

Several themes have emerged for us in the last 45 days that are worth sharing. Encouragement, failure, and observing appear to not have much in common, but in the course of our travels we saw a common thread. 

Pass the Encouragement

Billy Graham died on February 21st, and we were struck by the breadth of personalities that weighed in on the impact of his teachings. One particular quote stood out and we decided to email it to a few people under the heading of “everyone needs some encouragement."  It had to do with his response to a question he got at a conference later in his life. He was asked, “Who is the next Billy Graham?”

He replied. “You all are the next Billy Graham.”

We received a very high response rate in which people shared their own experiences and passed the encouragement back to us. We are hoping for a similar result in this newsletter. 

Encouragement came up around another topic that is timely and has to do with inspiring women and girls to lead. It is speculated that confidence can sometimes be missing from the minds of women and especially pre-teen girls. Encouragement from others appears to be a key ingredient. Katy Kay and Claire Shipman’s recent book called “The Confidence Code” outlines it in detail. We highly recommend either the adult or children’s version.  Of course as word geeks we like that in the midst of the EN and the MENT there is something we love…. A huge dollop of COURAGE.

Free-Falling Into Failure

Working with companies, non-profits, and sports teams affords us a wonderful window into the world of effort and outcome. Goals are set, causes are cared for, and games are played. A haunting question lurks in many of the minds, what do I do if I try my hardest and fail?

Seldom do we hear it verbalized, but we notice that much effort is made to sabotage the effort piece of the equation to allow the players a margin to recover their pride when the outcome is below the standard.  It's much safer to reserve some effort and hope for success, if it gives you a nice mental pillow to rest your ego on..."well I didn't go all out so next time...."

Our question for leaders is, what is this mindset and handicap doing to the productivity of your team? If you could minimize it and get your team to deal with success and failure with the same attitude, what would that look like?  Under pressure we don't rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our training.

Achieving this outcome is no easy feat.  One of the steps in getting there is done by providing a safe area to communicate what trying your hardest looks like, and having a recovery element to reward the effort. If people will risk their best in front of others, then when their limit is met, consider celebrating and providing them sanctuary to recoup and reflect.

The power questions for leading a team to risk more, think more, and do more are: what did we learn, and what does it mean? As the leader facilitates the questions and honors the responses watch the trust on your team soar. We think other things will soon rise as well.

Observing Your Next Sporting Event

Pitching in to support your children in their endeavors has a name. It’s called parenting. It’s a noble role and duty that changes with the decades. Currently from the ages of 4 to 14 there are many different roles a parent can fulfill in the area of youth sports. The roles have different levels of authority and requirements. Head Coach, assistant coach, team manager, culture keeper, league treasurer, league president, end of season of pizza party planner, are all roles parents fill. 

Both Sara and I have enjoyed participating and working with the kids and others parents these past ten years. What caught our eye this year is that after moving towns, we went from a head coach, league president, large authority role to that of an assistant coach. 

The opportunity to not have to coordinate and orate to 15 players on a team and to 200 players in the league and 30 to 400 parents left a void that allowed an observation framework to appear. This year we had room to see players individually be afraid of failure and to encourage them. Our interest in building framework for others to use also led us to come up with an observation grid to reflect on what the next step in each player’s development might be.

This concept of an individual’s next step has excellent cross-over for the business world. Team sports are like companies. It is really easy to get lost watching the ball and only focusing on the key players. In youth sports, we have a charge to use the sport as a constraint to develop the player’s character and foster an interest in putting forth a maximum effort towards a shared goal. “Do your best for the team and learn how to smile and adapt in the face of adversity.”  It can be fun and it can also be hard. In fact the fun meter changes over time. Sports Fun goes from going to the ice cream store kind of fun to climbing a hard hill fun. Matching the challenge to the age group and interest level can be difficult. 

With this in mind and with my new role allowing me time to observe, we came up with a sequential set of questions.

1.    Did we observe the player hustle?
a.    This can be off the bus, on the sidelines, or in the game.
2.    Did we observe the player exhibit team first behaviors?
a.    This can be off the bus, on the sidelines, or in the game.
3.    Did we observe that the player remain centered and able to communicate during the competition?
4.    Did we observe the players performance in the game/match?

Each column has room for three answers:  + for a yes, 0 for a no we did not observe, and – for we observed the player do the opposite of our desired outcome.

Any parent or coach could observe a competition and use this template. What we noticed in using the form is that it really helps us coach the next practice. We are quickly able to recall the moment and the teaching concept that can be brought to the next practice. We can praise the player for the positive and share our observations and offer instruction to develop the spots that need to improve.

As with most of our templates, they evolve over time, so please use it to improve it and we welcome your feedback.

Looking ahead to the summer we hope that you will take joy in encouraging those around you to offer up their maximum effort and that your slow and generous observation eye is in use as you lead your teams. 

Courting Serendipity...at the Masters

Bonus Section: A curious confluence of events afforded me the chance to attend my first Masters. The story, combining a first visit to Augusta with growing the game of golf in India is here:

Five Years of Branching Out

Five years ago Banyan Tree Strategies was formed with three clients and a belief that we could help people grow their businesses. We started writing about what we were doing for others on our website and by way of this newsletter and our client engagements rose to a sustainable level.

In the past 45 days we have continued to fine tune our offerings to more clearly answer the question, what does Banyan do for companies? The answers, in their current form are at our redesigned BanyanTreeStrategies website. We are continuing to add content and offerings and want to thank you for reading our newsletter, and for following us as we share what we have discovered in helping people and companies pursue performance improvement. 

In this Edition:

One of the ways we prepare this newsletter is to track the conversations we are having, and then look to build a framework that will stand alone to help others self-administer a solution. Two conversations that have presented themselves worthy of this attention are what we are calling The Four Timelines of Customer Acquisition, and The Three Circles of your Network. We hope these two frameworks will give you insight into your business or community service efforts.  We close with a process to run inside the two frameworks we outlined above. It's called the Daily 5 - Inside the Magic Window. It is a great way to keep the number of interesting people you are meeting up, while still staying on track with your primary job. 

The Four Timelines of Customer Acquisition

Companies want to grow, but can’t raise their prices.

This framework came out of discussions with business owners seeking to grow their company while not having any pricing power. Where to focus their time and which conversations were most important are questions the Four Timelines can flush out. A closer look at how to use it yourself is here.

The Three Circles of Your Network

Shared experiences can build trust, and trust is a foundational element of commerce.

The Three Circles framework helps you categorize your potential customer base. It then helps you position your messaging. Our research has shown that a prospect's behavior changes based upon past shared experiences. It appears that there is a high incentive to draw those far from you into your circle of customers who trust your offering. Give it a look and then think through how you might craft your next marketing message.  

Building A Network One Coffee Cup at a Time

If you are working in a metropolitan area being in close proximity to other professionals provides you with the opportunity to do what interesting people are already doing and create a first shared experience. We named it the Daily 5 - Breakfast, Coffee, Lunch, Coffee, & Drinks -because we noticed really busy people still doing all five quite often. Why not just ask them if you can share that time with them and share insights? All you need is a plan, the guts to ask them, and a premise to help them or provide insights. The key is to get one or two slots a week where you get out of your work rut and broaden your horizons with interesting and influential people. Our how-to white paper on the topic is here and is also on our courses page at www.banyantreestrategies.com. 

Cheers to the next five years!
Drew and Sara

Grading Your Goals

Happy New Year, and welcome to one of the most productive 45-day segments of the year. The collective surge of our world’s re-prioritization of all things work-related can be felt by all our senses. 

The team at Banyan has been busy preparing a year of relevant insights as you lead your teams, and we are happy to announce that a sister site and blog at www.drewsanders.com is now live to assist individuals at key inflection points in their lives. Both sites will work off the same platform, offering advice in small consumable amounts, and the new site is just starting to evolve. The menu of options will also allow users to pick a course and receive items in a PDF or a series of emails. The emails will direct you to answer questions to develop your own learning. Your answers will be organized and emailed to you automatically. 

Our aim is to equip you with relevant knowledge that you can use in key areas of your life. We will pick the topics based upon the work we are doing for clients and friends. If you want us to research an area for a future course, please let us know. 

 Fresh Look at Goals

Five years ago we started Banyan with an eye for helping companies improve their performance, and we have sat in on numerous goal-setting sessions. Goals can make people be sick to their stomachs, and goals can be used as a weapon, but isn’t that kind of missing the whole point? 

Today, we offer you a new way to look at goals, and hope you might consider giving it a try in one area of your life.  It starts with a mindset that focuses on goal attainment, and uses the concept of school grades to dole out the rewards.  If you reach 90% of the goal you get an A, 80% you get a B and so forth. C’s get degrees in school and historically is considered the average.   

Yes, we can hear you thinking, that may be good for school, but this is the real world. If you don’t hit your goal, you might get fired!

Here is why you might want to take a closer look at this mindset if you are a leader. When you give your team a goal, you have 'goaled' them. This rhymes with scold. We think you should keep that image in mind. Teams that are assigned goals do not stretch, or reach, and some of them don’t even think. They just deliver the goal and oftentimes will do so with a nice passive aggressive, up yours buried somewhere in the result. 

You the leader lose out on a major chance for upside when you make the goal the minimum acceptable standard and think that your team will still work to exceed the goal because they want to go the extra mile. 

The financial rewards that come with goals are highly motivating to some. However, the intrinsic motivators of choice, autonomy, competency, and progress can have a huge impact for your joint benefit. We are noticing that the following recipe can really pay off with your teams. 

Step 1: 
Share the goal attainment mindset with your team, and walk them through how the compensation will work, and how you are viewing job security tied to goal attainment. It is up to you if you want to let people go who are 79% to goal or 69% to goal. It is fair to assume that everyone knows a minimum acceptable standard is necessary. However what you are looking to accomplish is getting most of the fear out of the room and allowing for some creativity to show up. Fear based goal setting can get you 60% of a person’s focus. The other 40% will be based on self-preservation actions like looking for work elsewhere and kissing up internally just in case. When you dial down the fear, laziness doesn’t automatically show up. Initiative and collaboration have time to breed and the results can be fantastic.

Step 2: 
Have an open ended conversation about what is actually possible with your team. This may take time as you switch to the goal attainment mindset, but a fair and brisk discussion about what could happen might be revealing. Leaders often don’t really know what others are thinking because it is not in the team’s best interest to share, as it might turn into an all or nothing goal. The lack of trust that is built by perform or perish goals is significant, and once you are openly hearing what might be possible from your team then you are on the right track.

Step 3: 
Set up your goal tracking cadence and then listen for the stories. Meet on a regular basis and don’t skip these meetings, you have to be in the hospital to miss this meeting. It is that important that you, as the leader, are on this call. Listen for the stories, as they are a sign of something going differently than people had hoped. Don’t jump on them in public, but privately meet with the story teller and work through to what is changing. Identify if it is an internal issue like time management, or an external issue like a change of leadership at a large prospect. Address the issue right away and help keep this person in the process of the best actions that lead to success. Once your team is actually striving on their own towards a goal they want to achieve, they will start to fail. Don’t miss the chance to work through these failures together! 

Step 4: 
Treat success and failure as tools for everyone’s understanding and development. One of the side benefits of a goal attainment culture is it increases the amount of sharing. Everyone should be able to perform well enough to stick around, and now you are focused on getting everyone into the A category. When someone succeeds, share it. When someone is getting stuck, share it. As the leader set the example of not judging failure, but observing it. The difference is that judgement is looking for blame, and observation is seeking clarity. Creating a workplace with clarity of purpose is a leader’s job. On the pathway towards accomplishment the world will present obstacles. You want to know about the obstacles in your team’s path immediately.

Cultures of fear have worked for centuries. We are not saying they don’t work. We are offering an alternative mindset which can require more consensual interdependence between the leader and the team. We have seen it make a real impact and will continue to share our findings for leaders to consider.

Would You Wish Your Children Bad Luck?

As the saying goes, one of the most competitive sports in America is parenting. This has been taken to a new level in recent decades with elite schools not growing their admittance pools, then why is it that the new standard is for college graduates to move back home? Have we extended adolescence in a perpetual state of not wanting to disappoint our children? Should we disappoint our kids?

I know, great idea Drew and Sara, you try it first and let us know how it works out. Well, thankfully Chief Justice Roberts has come out and done it for us in a recent speech to a group of 9th graders, and it is summarized by well-known author Bob Greene. If you are a practicing parent of any age and you have thoughts on how to weave in some disappointment into the threads of today’s K-12 education please share​ and we will make sure to incorporate it in our communications. 

Correlating this concept with our prior thoughts on goals, it appears that striving brings about failure, which brings about reflection, which leads to learning, which leads to dreaming, which leads to hope, which leads to action, which leads to striving. What a great loop!

Setting Personal Goals With Words

You have a really good chance of being in control of your attitude. If you don’t like static goals like make this much money, buy that car, or climb that mountain, consider setting some attitude goals. You can achieve them at some point every day, and that accomplishment may just propel you to achieve something else. We suggest you change up the attitude goals for the different relationships in your life. 

Here is a template for you to use and print out and below I share mine for 2018:

2018 Attitude and Behavior Goals:

Self
Breathe, Observe, Smile
Marriage
Listen, Encourage, Support
Children
Hug, Cheer, Model
Extended Family
Love, Care, Share
Work
Create, Engage, Pursue Remarkability
Recreation
Move Daily, Sing, Swim 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Drew and Sara

Thankful For You

​Welcome to the last days of 2017 and our final communication of the year. We have a few observations from the previous 45 days of October and early November hustle, and hope they will help you in some way prepare for the holidays and their inevitable bustle. In this edition we have a top ten list question, an eight touches a year idea, and a 397 year old connection.  

Who Were the Top 10 Most Interesting People You Met This Year?

​This idea was formed when we shared with someone in an email that they were one of the 10 most interesting people that we had met in 2017. It was a true statement, but we hadn’t really thought of the other nine yet. However, upon reflection, we knew any list we created would have that person in the top 10, so we thought they would like the encouragement.

This got us thinking that at the time of year when people gather with family and old friends, that you might have some fun thinking about a list of the new people that you really enjoyed meeting. What made them interesting to you? Were they as interesting to others? Was it that they had power and influence or talents you appreciated? 

Consider making a list and then reflecting on not only who they are, but why they were interesting to you. Compare it with your close friends and then have a fun discussion on what the list says about both the admired and the admirer. Looking ahead to the holidays, this idea might make some of your old hat family dinners a little livelier than in the past. 

Is It Time To Kill All the Golfers..?

We thought we would inject a little humor into a tough subject that is often associated with the end of the year. Reaching the annual sales target. The idea came out a series of discussions with business owners and suggests that this can be a good time of year to remove a certain type of lead that is clogging up the funnel. 

These aren’t the clients or the deals that have momentum. There are plenty of deals getting done prior to the end of the year, and Dec 31st is a wonderful impending event to create tension and focus for both buyer and seller.

These are the potential business relationships that just make both sides feel awkward. They look and sound like this:   CLICK HERE FOR FULL TEXT

In Caddy Shack terms....you are killing all the gophers!!

The Five Kernels of Wisdom 397 Years Later

​November 15, 1620 witnessed The Mayflower at anchor near the shore in Cape Cod Bay. Four days prior they had arrived and were now assessing the best place to build their colony. The first few years saw them face immense hardship from the seasonal conditions and tremendous friendship from the Native American’s. There also was an ill-timed and named visit by the ship The Fortune in the early years which didn’t bring much needed supplies, just more colonists and professional sailors looking for clothes and sustenance. 

As a way to remember the famine and lean times the lesson of the 5 kernels of corn and their significance was created in the early 1800’s and has since been shared throughout thanksgiving tables across our country and a copy for your ready reference is here.  

Today there are tens of millions of descendants​ who are alive because of the fortitude and resolve of those early settlers. Over the course of the next three years as we reach the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock we will share with you in the final edition of each year the stories that are told as America reaches this new milestone. 

Kernels can be like pearls, associated with wisdom and this is our hope for each of us as we age. The ability to learn from the past and share it with others. When you think about what you want passed on to your family members this Thanksgiving, what is it? What are your hopes and dreams for them? 397 years later is it that much different, the wish of a mother or father for their children?

We thought it would be only fitting after writing about the Mayflower to thank you for your ship, more specifically your readership, mentorship, and friendship in 2017. 

See you in the New Year!

Drew & Sara

Welcome to October and the fastest 45 days of the year. The first six weeks of the 4th quarter are a doer’s dream, no matter the setting the players are playing. If it is going to get done in 2017 action is required. A challenge that arises with all this activity is what to do first, and how to work with others when accomplishing larger tasks. These choices fall right in line with the conversations we have been having with leaders for the last five years and sharing with you in Branches & Roots.  A lot of it comes down to this question: who is going to do what by when, and whom are they going to tell about it?

Our most recent conversations have been centered on visions, budgets, attitudes, and energy. We hope these summaries are helpful for you as you lead yourself and others through this short six week season.

Does Your 2018 Start With a Budget or a Vision?

We have found the answer to this question changes depending on the location and altitude of the person you are asking. What about in your own life?  Do you start with a set of numbers, or with a dream? Your financial position is a vital component of your decision making process, money has rules and realities that are as consistent as the law of gravity. What you can afford to do and how to allocate your resources is a vital constraint you should have a handle on for 2018.

In the context of business, we have had a similar conversation several times in September. What does the budget look like for 2018? Who is getting more, who is getting less? It keeps your eyes down and it kills creativity. In this scenario you grab as big a budget as you can, and then justify how you are using it during the year to help the unit, and your compensation for overseeing the projects. We have come to call the people adept at this tactic BUDGET HOUNDS because they can smell the scent of a budget a mile away and think of little else once on the trail. 

Our observation is that being a budget hound maybe good in a crisis when you are just trying to get to the next year, but if you want to get somewhere different and better, you need to learn how to dream. We all need to practice dreaming, and then writing those visions down and turning them into action. 

Jeff Foley is a retired Brigadier General and a friend. In 2015 he gave a Ted-X talk in Augusta, Georgia where he walked the audience through how to script out a vision for the next five years.

• Five years from today is October 1, 2022.
• Where do you want to be on that day?
• Who do you want to be on that day?
• How do you want to feel on that day?
• With whom would you like to be with on that day?  

Your budget will help you get there as a constraint for financial discipline, but without a vision and a written out target your chances of meeting those goals are slim. Enjoy Jeff’s video where he talks about Character, Attitude, Vision, Excellence, and Relationships and how they can all fit nicely on a yellow pad of paper. 

Attitudes and Energy

• Attitudes are contagious, is yours worth catching?
• The person most committed to their attitude wins.
• You had better shape up that attitude or ship out. 

These are the mantras I heard growing up and have continued to share into adulthood. Few people would contest the fact that attitudes matter; it’s just such a pain to changing them in others. Most of the time we just move on. 

Recently, we encountered a situation where a leader couldn’t move on. They had a team that was mostly bulletproof from a job standpoint, and it was the manager’s job to improve the productivity for the company. Blowing off the attitude was no longer an option. What to do?

Through research and interviews we started to tease out how attitude and energy (or what some might call productivity) are highly correlated. From a science perspective this is not a ground breaking discovery, most parents have come to the same conclusion. The learning came from just how quickly we could turn attitudes around, and tap into the hidden energy reserves with some well-timed listening and consistent leadership behavior. 

The simple science: Miserable people do not outperform optimistic people. Optimistic people are distracted less and stay on task. They are optimistic because they know the answer to the question: why am I here, and why does this task matter to me and others? 

The learning: To get a group of miserable workers to become optimistic when you don’t have the ability to pay them more, or even make their work day that much different comes down to understanding how to use gratitude as a trigger for changing attitudes. You then identify the influencers and listen. Mark when and where they are either leading the team higher or lower from an attitude standpoint. Do some careful study work with the influencers, away from the group, and find the key intrinsic motivators (see image below) that matter to them and the group. You should be able to meet some of the intrinsic needs of choice, autonomy, progress and competency within the construct of the required tasks. That combined with gratitude as an agreed upon foundational value of the group, has proven to turn a group of miserable adults with a boss into an optimistic team with a humble leader. 

New Branches

Banyan is working on its own 2018 to 2022 vision and we will be testing out a few new micro-brands. “The Team Leader Club” and “Leadership Hub” are both concepts we will be sharing as we create content and learning offerings for people in the five theaters of self, family, work, community, and your network. Our current thinking is to offer our expanded network of 3100 followers a series of member benefits for being under the canopy of Banyan Tree Strategies. You are a member, you belong. Several questions we have been noodling on are:

• What do you need?
• What do you want to learn more about when it comes to leading yourself and others?
• Who in your organization or family has needs and how can we meet those needs with our offerings and tools? 

As a member, we welcome your thoughts and ideas here.

Prioritizing, Publishing, Mentoring

Most of the summer vacations have now concluded and the rapid pace of fall meetings and events are right around the corner. We heard many tales of great summer trips and experiences and we hope you were able to use the longer days to recreate yourself and reflect on what matters most to you and your closest relationships. 

We enjoy sharing our learning every 45 days with you in the hopes of stimulating interesting discussion between us, and potentially between you and others. In this edition of Branches and Roots:

- We analyze how constraints develop your skills
- How LinkedIn can help you amplify your career even when you have a great job
- What being a mentor can do for the second half of your career. 

Got A Template For That?

Building off the great reaction we received from our post on productive solitude we started to notice that in many of our work conversations we were asking leaders how they were organizing their thinking and in what format. Were they using a computer, a phone, a note pad, or a bound notebook? When did they collect themselves and organize? Who did they share it with, and how did they share it? 

The answers were all over the board, and many didn’t really have a system in place. They offered up that they are bouncing around trying whatever the newest form of technology has to offer. We also noticed that many leaders thought that the idea of sharing what they are doing to be a big enabler for productivity, however, that wasn’t really playing out as they thought. It was leading to more emails and more confirmations on non-mission critical tasks. Does this sound familiar?

Enter in the concept of a template as a way to create boxes waiting to be filled in with answers that challenge you to prioritize your thinking. An individual benefits by working with a task allocation template like the one below. The act of not just writing down your tasks, but prioritizing them, and then estimating the time it will take to complete the task has a calming effect.  It gets your to-do’s out of your brain.

Once you have written down your tasks you can then share it with others. If you are the manager of others, consider using this template as a tool to help them develop their own way of thinking on how they are allocating their time. There are plenty of smart people who are horrible at allocating their time, and it is hard to coach them on this without appearing overbearing. Asking them to complete the template will give you a window into what they think is most important and could foster some healthy dialogue around their choices. 

Constraints have long been used by athletic coaches to help players practice longer, and to develop a certain piece of the puzzle. When we are helping someone with their putting in golf we often have them putt with just their right or left hand to increase their awareness of a specific part of the stroke. Similarly, having a direct report complete the above template could build awareness around the importance of allocating their time tied into their team's needs relative to their own. 

The Long Tail Game and How LinkedIn is Helping You Build Your Brand

It was front page news in 1982 when IBM announced it was laying off employees, the security of lifetime employment with Big Blue was in doubt. The undertone to others was this meant that almost no private sector employee was safe.  From moments like that 35 years ago to today, the idea of a personal brand and its cultivation have been forming. You, the individual, have the ability to create what the brand marketers will define as a 'promise wrapped up in an experience' and LinkedIn has been building a platform for your brand since its founding in 2002. 

In the last five years LinkedIn has not only been a great place to store all of your contacts, it is a great place to share your thoughts and perspectives. In a business world where almost all employment contracts are “at-will” (which means you are working week to week at the whim of your boss), it is increasingly important to have a place to share what you have to offer an industry or marketplace. 

There are several key actions to consider when it comes to publishing on LinkedIn. The first is to share what others have posted and add your comments. This is easy lifting and benefits the person who created the original content. The second is to set up a writing schedule and some topics you like to cover and start sharing your own thoughts. This content will live online for a long time, and can be referenced by you on other websites. The power of written content for your career has a very long tail. 

The most recent development from LinkedIn is the ability to share a video. While this may seem like the last thing any of us want to do, it will have an impact on how we learn, and what we expect when meeting new professionals.  If you were looking to hire someone and they had a short clip about themselves, it could be of great use to see how they communicate and handle themselves in front of a camera.

Two generations removed from 1982 the relationship between corporations and individuals has evolved into a measured marriage. Individuals now have the option of creating and maintaining a professional store front on LinkedIn, a place to store not only contacts but their work product.  You own your career and we see LinkedIn as a valuable partner.

Allowing Wisdom To Rise

Having a trusted friendship with a person years older or younger than you is a true gift. We often refer to these non-familial connections as mentors or mentees. The roots of the word go back to ancient Greece when Mentor who was a friend of Odysseus was entrusted with the education of Odysseus' son Telemachus.

Relationships that are strong have certain elements that help them build. Affinity, time, shared experiences all are ingredients. One of the outcomes from a strong cross generational relationship is that it can allow the subtle gift of wisdom to present itself. When wisdom arrives it means the mentor has built up enough trust with the younger party to share their best insights and perspective. Often times this can be life changing for the mentee.

Yet for all its benefits, great mentors are in short supply. Why is this? It may have something to do with the all-important shared experiences. The generations don’t always do things together, and thus it is hard to form the bonds. Technology hasn’t helped. Then there is the hubris of youth always thinking there has to be a better way than it was done in the old days. 

We share this as a preamble to what we think is a great new mentoring system that has been built by the team at Instaviser. It is an internal mentoring engine that institutions can use to allow the younger generation to connect with the alumni. We were introduced to it through our involvement with Cal Athletics. Instaviser branded Cal’s system with the name Golden Ties and Drew was asked to be a mentor. On several occasions a Cal student-athlete was able to find Drew’s profile on the password protected site and book a 30 mentoring session. 

In both situations the common connection of having gone to Cal was enough to allow an easy conversation to ensue, and the beginnings of a relationship were born. The student-athlete had questions about work and job opportunities, and I was able to offer some thoughts and people for them to meet. 

So many of our work and nonprofit institutions have a treasure trove of wisdom locked up in the minds of its elder participants. We will all benefit as it is transferred to younger generations. Hopefully solutions like the one Instaviser has built will gain traction inside the institutions you care about, and we will be able to pass down the principles and values to tomorrow’s leaders. 

If you have an interest in being a mentor on any topic, please email us here and we will do our best to get you connected with the right team.