The Challenger

Back in February of this year we highlighted a book by Sam Walker by the name of The Captain Class that identified the captain as a key element to long term team success. 

While digging deeper on the topic for our clients we noticed that the correlation of Walker’s captains with Glenn Parker’s work on team player styles and the most volatile team player style, “the challenger.” 

Parker's work was mostly inside large corporations in the 70’s through early 90’s but his book Team Players and Teamwork is still relevant today. His research lays out four traits for how people will behave when working with others: Contributor, Communicator, Collaborator and Challenger. Everyone exhibits all four traits when interacting with others, however, it’s the order they prioritize them that impacts the group.  The group that prioritizes being a challenger is the smallest, and his perspective about how to work with and advise this group has been of prescient. 
 

Why you want Challengers on your team:
“Challengers push the team to talk openly about problems and things getting in their way of success.” 

How others can react to a Challenger:
“Ironically, many Challengers are accused of not being team players because they raise objections to team decisions.”
 
What a coach needs to share with their Challenger:
“The real mark of an effective Challenger is their knowing when to stop pushing.”

Sports teams can be great places for challengers, the rules and boundaries allow them to flourish as they can focus their drive to excel and not be distracted by some of the constant changes of life. In work or family settings the challenger can be a bit exhausting to those with contribution or collaboration as dominant traits.

Our key learning when combining Walker’s and Parker’s work is to empower the challengers to call the team higher while making sure they realize others will have different needs. If one of your highest performers is also a challenger consider having the team take the Parker Team Player survey so the rest of the members will have a better understanding of these traits. This can lead to mutual respect being maintained over the course of a season or year when tensions rise due to losses or setbacks in goal obtainment.

As a leader or coach, establishing a common language for your team in some key areas is a big part of defining who is “on” the team. How people naturally want to act when with others is something you can leverage to help the group become a team. We hope Walker’s and Parker’s efforts will allow you to effectively identify your team’s traits so you can manage and lead them to challenge each other to find their best collective self.

Interested in other posts on similar topics?  Check out our blog.

The Banyan Book

We are excited to announce coming in the first quarter of 2020 will be the Banyan Book, a compilation of our best practices, writings, and tools in a handbook for business owners and managers. As always, we welcome the chance to speak with you.

​Profits, Culture & Threats
​
Hello and welcome to the final 45 days of the 2019, we hope it has been a good year for you. The team at Banyan is thankful for the contributions we have been asked to make. Business owners and managers are constantly thinking about profits, culture and threats. This time of year can be one of reflection and projection in all these areas and we have a few thoughts for you in each category. 

Profits

Are your people used to being pushed to have goals? Do you tell them what they need to hit to achieve a mythical number that most think is made to line your pocketbooks and not theirs? Do they understand how and why the goals are put together? If you would like a fresh look at goals and how they can help motivate your team, consider this post:  

Culture

Can you outline how you build culture? Most cannot. It’s a gut thing for many and a “I know it when I see it” response for others. 

Andressen Horowitz’s founding partner Ben Horowitz has another book out that is a worthy read for any leader. What You Do is Who You Are addresses the issue of how to build a culture. His first book The Hard Thing About Hard Things laid out that there is no recipe to building a culture or a company.  His latest book takes on the root stock needed to make a culture soup and he does so with some historical reviews that will shock you. 

Our biggest takeaway is that sometimes you need rules that stand out so much they show off what actions will define your culture. Like fining NFL Football players for being two minutes early like Tom Coughlin did when he was shaping the culture of the New York Giants. The reason, the rule was all meetings started five minutes early…

This book reminded  us of Jack Clark’s talk a few years back about establishing values and then having questions that activate those values into actions that can be seen and felt by everyone on the team. They define who is not on the team as much as they show who is on the team. 

Threats
 
We have two essays on this topic for you. One is about how you are using innovation and the threats you will face if you don’t understand what type you are fighting against, the other is more subtle and is tied to an internal threat you may face from your own people.  If your people are always telling you what you want to hear and you don’t have an established way of getting in and out of hard conversations, then there is a really good chance they are also telling your customers what they want to hear.  This is most likely hurting the company. 

Essay #1: The Difference Between Early and Late Stage Innovation
Early stage innovation is what Keith Krach talks about with his concept of finding a beach head: Big enough to eat off of and small enough to defend. He should know, he has created four category-killers in his career and is now the Under Secretary of Economic Growth.  Here is his point on beach heads:
 
When you are seeking to be an early stage innovator you need adventurous capital that will be patient while you disrupt an industry.

Late stage innovation is what Mike Maddock likes to talk about when he holds up an IPhone and asks, what can you do with this device to further surprise and delight your customers?  
 
You need less capital and more curiosity here.

Most business owners are not in early stage innovation mode.  They are in long-stage business cycles and earning a good profit margin which they control. The key in a long stage business cycle is to gain control of the profit. As a business owner it is important that you understand the game you are playing.

Some examples of late stage innovation:
•    Professional Services
•    Law
•    Medicine
•    Financial Services
•    Insurance Services
•    Telecommunication Services
•    IT Services
•    Manufacturing
•    Software as a Service

Examples of early stage innovation
•    Docusign (the world didn’t have a way to securely sign for things digitally)
•    Apple's IPhone (the world didn’t have access to email, text, phone and camera that they couldn’t be without)
•    Facebook (the world didn’t have access to their friends experiences that they couldn’t be without)
•    UBER (the world didn’t have a way to share cars that were personally owned)
•    Amazon (the world didn’t have a way buy almost anything and have it show up in less than two days)

Mike Maddock asks us, how are you using the benefits of these early stage innovators to create a more pleasing and delightful experience for your customers? When you stay curious to the new while delivering the old, you may find that what you own and control improves in its financial fundamentals through customer satisfaction and new customers acquisition through the holy grail of “word of mouth.”

Essay #2: When is the right time to have a hard conversation?
Ask anyone in the C-suite and you will get something close to: Now is as good as time as any.

Ask anyone further down the org chart and you are more likely to eventually here: Never is fine with me.

This spectrum of answers reflects a common culture issue tied to power and influence and safety. Those with low power avoid conflict and those with power don’t understand why others are afraid of it.

We always have fun with owners who have lots of power at work and ask them how it feels at home with their spouse…it usually gets the point across.

The issue this difference creates is that the people solving the problems for customers, building products and services, and acquiring new customers are the ones that really need to have the tools to have hard conversations - and win those conversations - on behalf of the company.

Innovating Like a Virus

The fast fall finish is here, and after a quick inventory of the issues facing our clients right now we will outline a few and what we are doing to solve them. We think you will be able to relate and hope we have a solution or two that will help.  If you have an insight of your own please pass along your thoughts here.

Current Issues Business Owners Are Facing

The Issue:  We are innovating and have a few of the right customers, but getting more of the right customers can be slog. 
 
“They treat us like a virus until they take the time to really look at it and then we are the cure.”
 
We thought this quote from a sales rep really nailed it. Your offering is treated by the buyer like a virus until it’s the cure. The enterprise buyers really have a lot on the line when they are making a decision and the switching costs can be significant. They are right to be thorough, the stakes are high.

Consider a three point solution that is working now:
1. Write about the pain the customer could be experiencing now in a manner which fits their attention span when first learning about something new. Don’t drop War and Peace on them when all they want is the 411. They should able to get the gist of what you do in less than 30 seconds and then have the ability to review for up to three minutes with your writing or video content.

2. Give them an example of a current customer similar to them and how it is working. The Case Study example can be a challenge if your solution is not focused, but start with three typical customers and walk them through the experience. This should be no more than a three to five minute commitment for the buyer and it will help them relate to your other customers.

3.  Make the first dialogue option as short and sweet as possible while still having enough in it for you. Unless you are in charge of acquiring thousands of customers a year you really don’t need to be too concerned about tracking the first two data points in this example. You should be aware of the numbers but your first real leading indicator to track religiously are first time dialogues with a prospect. We suggest you use a 30 minute discovery call and really focus on the needs and outcomes desired by your buyer before you launch into your solutions. 

You should be updating your writing on points one and two at least twice a year, tracking your first time calls and asking the team why is this working or why isn’t this working on a regular cadence.

No Thanks, We Got This Taken Care of In-House

The Issue:  When your job is on the line, sometimes you would rather have an employee working for you than a contractor.  The doing it yourself vs outsourcing it tension is very real in today’s economy.
 
Employees are expensive, and yet the “at-will” contract creates the ability for the best to turn the table on the employer and leave on a whim. This often leaves only the average to poor employees who want to stick around to handle mission critical tasks.

If the boss has their bonus or job on the line, sometimes they deal with attrition issues and building the team internally because they feel like they are more in control.

These biases mean that if your company's offering is in any way reducing head count and outsourcing a service or skill, you had better be the A team. 

A SOLUTION
Part of getting someone to let go of control is to help them understand where their time could be better spent if they didn’t have to worry about the problem you solve for. You can accomplish this by asking them to list out the top 10 things they deal with at work on a weekly basis, and then ask them which one has the biggest impact on their P&L. 

Chances are they are spending time doing and overseeing a series of low value-add objectives. When you can take those off their plate and allow them to refocus on their high ROE objectives you are making a different case for your joint success.

For more on this topic click on the graphic or click here for a case study article from Distillery Tech.

Is It Time To Buy or Sell?

The Issue: Should we stay or should we go?
 
Business transactions are a big part of the reason we are hired. Sometimes it’s to guide the company to an exit and other times it’s to help them with an acquisition. 

In the age of disruption, the size of your balance sheet and a clear understanding of how long you can protect your margins can help you answer the question of whether you should be a buyer or a seller. An additional factor is the age and motivation of the ownership. 

Can’t get your customers’ attention?
CONSIDER SELLING
​
A big challenge for many companies is the attention span of their buyers: it’s really short and they struggle to keep it. Going back to our earlier example, the people who might do business with you think you are marketing a virus, while your customers know you have the cure.

The largest player in your space doesn’t have this problem, their brand gets them in the door. This can become a significant competitive advantage. If the amount of time that the buyer has is limited, it is, and they are already doing business with that company, which they probably are, then you might want to consider locking up a couple of key accounts and then taking it to that larger player and allowing them to monetize it for you. 

John Chambers started at Cisco in 1991 and led one of the strongest sales cultures in the world. Cisco then took its sizable balance sheet and has purchased over 200 companies to feed its sales force and their customer base. Here is a white paper from the company on their acquisition process.
 
Does your industry have an aging set of owners and no clear dominant players?
CONSIDER BUYING

If so and you are between 30 and 50 years of age, you might consider becoming an acquirer of these businesses. A great example of this is in the financial services industry. The wealth in the United States has typically been advised through either banks or brokerage firms. In the last 15 years the rise of the independent Registered Investment Advisory firm has fragmented the industry while it has continued to grow in line with the wealth of the country.  

High Net Worth individuals and medium sized nonprofits will attribute trust to an individual easily and this has allowed yesterday’s Morgan Stanley advisor to become today’s Registered Investment Advisory business owner.  With most companies offering similar services to their clients, and the clients’ reticence to discuss their wealth with multiple people, turnover remains low. The term “client for life” is often used in this industry. 

However, the advisor does end up retiring, lives do end, and the assets and their associated fees and revenues leave. Some advisors don’t plan for this and they wait until the last minute. Others plan ahead. If you are in the middle of your career it can be a great way to grow your customer base.

This is especially true if you are struggling to acquire new customers of your own. Your revenue per customer will be lower as you will be sharing that with the seller for a period of time, but if you establish trust with the customers and their dependents the life time value of the customer should make the cost to acquire that customer worth it.

The Lesson: when growth is slow, acquire older players and recruit young service professionals.
 


2019 has been an extremely active year for our clients and their businesses, if you need help solving for any of these issues or feel like you might benefit from an outside voice, we welcome the chance to speak with you.

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.