How To Slingshot From Invisible To Irresistible With Gabor George Burt
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Customer satisfaction is, and always will be, the ultimate purpose of any business. Reimagining your service apart from your competitors creatively can be game-changing. Author of Slingshot, and expert at making yourself magnetic to your customers, Gabor George Burt, goes back to where it all began, the curiosity and creativity of a child. He explains how applying creativity systematically in setting your brand apart can give leaps and bounds of success. Gabor relates this to keeping your customers infatuated with your product/service and how you can make this happen for your company.
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Slingshot From Invisible To Irresistible With Gabor George Burt
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Gabor George Burt, who is the author of Slingshot. He has been instrumental in blue ocean strategies and is an expert at innovation and reimagining how to make yourself magnetic to your customers. He talks about the importance of keeping the infatuation that customers have when they start working with you or trying your product. He said, “Standing still is not an option. Creativity is the most important leadership skill but people have trouble figuring out how to identify it and use it.” He’s going to show us how in this episode.
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I have a special guest. His name is Gabor George Burt. Gabor has a fascinating background and has been seen by many people in the world as an innovation expert. We have the pleasure of having a friendship and met through our mutual friend, Sameer Somal. I always like to give a shout-out to people who introduced me to great people. One of the things that Gabor is known for is his expertise as a global authority on reimagining boundaries. He’s the author of the book, Slingshot. He has the ability to speak around the world on innovation, creativity, and strategy, where he helps both individuals and organizations overstep these perceived limitations and carve out some successful growth strategies.
He is a leading expert on Blue Ocean Strategy and has contributed a case study material to that book. His new book, Slingshot takes off where that one’s ends. In other words, people have an understanding that there’s a need for a different way of thinking, but Gabor helps people figure out ways to start implementing that. He’s listed on that top list of Top Visionaries on numerous prominent appearances. He gave the opening presentation at the World Marketing Forum and was the architect and host of the Forum for Partnership in America. Gabor, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s so good to be with you.
[bctt tweet=”Standing still is no longer an option. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m always interested to hear people’s stories of origin. We see you being a global citizen and in cutting edge of innovation. I can only imagine what your childhood was like. Were you the kind of child that took apart the vacuum cleaner and try to figure out how it worked? You can take us back as far as you want when you decided you wanted to study one thing versus another in school. Wherever you want to start.
Thank you for asking. One of the things that I say when I’m asked about my background is to mention an intriguing fact. For a brief moment in time, I was once the youngest person on earth. If you think about it, that’s also true for you and for anyone. It’s an interesting insight because one of the core principles at the heart of my whole platform is this notion that all of us have this inner child that’s full of curiosity, adventure and wanting to do new things. We get disconnected as we grow older and that’s a real shame. One of the things I then ask is, “What evidence do you have that you were once a child and the youngest person on earth?” I’m thinking in the right direction.
I was born in Budapest, Hungary, hence my name. I was born during a period of communism, although as a child that was not as apparent in terms of what that meant. I was uprooted at age twelve and brought to America because my stepfather is American. As you can imagine, that’s a huge shift in everything in terms of the environment and culture. I didn’t speak a word of English. I’m Hungarian. I was studying Russian and French. That had a huge impact on my worldview and life philosophy. It’s always asking questions and looking at things almost from an external perspective and saying, “What if?” “Why does this have to work this way?” That’s the trajectory that I’ve been on.
Besides business, I studied psychology because I’ve always been interested in what motivates people. After having spent some time on Wall Street, I went back to business school after college. When I finished, coincidentally was when the Iron Curtain was coming down in Eastern Central Europe. I was invited to go back with Citibank and be part of the first Western-type banking in that whole region. I lived through that whole decade of the ‘90s, which to me is one of the most fascinating times in human history when a whole region transformed culturally, socially, economically and politically, in a mostly peaceful way.
Customer Service Satisfaction: Blue ocean is all about reimagining what you do and finding new market spaces of irresistible customer value.
I left the bank, after a short while and started my own business. I launched and ran a financial software company all the way until my favorite professor from business school, called me one day and said he finished the research to this new management and leadership concept. He thinks it will have a big appeal and invited me to be one of the first people to join him. That became the Blue Ocean Strategy, which of course went on to become the most influential leadership management concept of the new millennium.
It immediately appealed to me because Blue Ocean is all about reimagining what you do and finding new market spaces of irresistible customer value. I transitioned myself out of the business that I founded. For over ten years, I was one of the top blue oceanographers around the world. Based on my work with that, I was fascinated by the idea that everybody loves the notion of a blue ocean and wants to create one for their own business. In practice, few companies were ever able to do that and I wanted to find out why.
I arrived at the fact that everybody saw Blue Ocean as disruptive meaning leaving behind what you already know and are comfortable doing. Secondly, that no one was good at engaging their natural creativity, which is the fuel that you need in order to reimagine what you’re doing and find Blue Ocean. That was the impetus for me to set out and create my own framework, the Slingshot Framework, which is the practical application of Blue Ocean Strategy. That’s my journey.
That’s quite a journey. I love the what-if in your mindset and getting to do that what if implementation in Budapest and imagining what life would be like to introduce all that software and banking into the world. You mentioned that you’ve contributed some case study materials to Blue Ocean? Can you tell us about one of those?
[bctt tweet=”You were once the youngest person on earth. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
There was one particular one. If you have read or will read the Blue Ocean Strategy book, it’s full of some great examples, but all of them are about either big companies or companies in well-developed markets like the US market or Europe. I thought that in order to make it universally appealing, it should also have a story about a startup from a developing up and upcoming part of the world. Naturally, I went back to Eastern Europe and found the story of a startup, a bus company called NABI, North American Bus Industries, which, in a short time, broke into the US municipal bus market. It was an already saturated and competitive industry and the way they approached it was absolutely a Blue Ocean. That was my contribution, the case study, which you can read about in the book.
What do you typically get hired to do with companies that want to have you come in and be a keynote speaker? What is a typical topic and your ideal audience?
It’s undeniable that there is an absolute transformation going on in business now. People talk about the VUCA world, which is an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Adversity. It’s this perfect cocktail and storm of difficult conditions. What that means is that for any organization, standing still is not an option. You’re either moving forward, one of the future shapers and actively configuring the direction of your market space or you get left behind. You’re the ones that become a casualty and at best you’re trying to react to all the change around you.
What I get asked to do in my talks, engagements and work with companies and organizations around the world is to help them be one of the former groups. It’s to be one of the future shapers. I do that by going in and challenging their thinking with the assumption that every single leadership team and company no matter how successful still operates within what I call self-imposed mental boundaries. I expose those boundaries and I take them beyond. The best way I can summarize that is there’s a wonderful old Southern expression that says, “You can’t see the label if you’re inside the jar.” That’s what I do. Every company is somehow confined within a jar because they accept certain assumptions, traditions, limitations that are artificial. What I do is that I come in and I expose those boundaries. I show them the label and help them get outside the jar.
Customer Service Satisfaction: When you’re talking to a prospective client or customer on a high note, get their attention, and their emotional connectivity.
What I’d like to do now is have you walk us through how we can start reimagining the boundaries that we’ve either put on ourselves self-imposed or that we come across in situations. There’s a five-step process. The first one is the one that intrigues me, which is this concept of the infatuation interval. You have a wonderful story that you wrote about your son and his trains. Would you share that story as the introduction to an infatuation interval?
There are two major components of what I do. First is this notion of exposing everyone to this incredible resource which is our creativity organization-wide or individually. Survey after survey shows that in fact, creativity is the most important leadership skill now. That’s the one that CEOs put on the top of their list yet, they also then go on to say that they fell ill-equipped in terms of understanding its power and harnessing and nurturing creativity in their organization. One of the first things I do is to bring them to understand that creativity is something that’s dormant and we can reconnect and systematically apply.
For example, I tell the story of three tourists walking in Africa on a Safari in the Serengeti. All of a sudden, an angry and ferocious lion jumps out in front of them. It’s baring its teeth and groundling. Its intentions are clear. It’s hungry and the three tourists act differently. The first one is absolutely terrified, frozen in fear and is unable to move at all. The second one immediately starts to take off any extra garment and equipment, the vest, water bottle and the backpack. The third one is calmly assessing the situation with his hands in his pocket. After a while, the first tourist turned to the second one and says, “What are you doing?” The second one says, “I want to run as fast as I can.” The first one says, “You’re crazy. You’re never going to outrun the lion.” The second one says, “It’s not the lion that I have to outrun.” The third tourist after a few more seconds takes out a lighter from his pocket, lights it and scares away the lion.
This is representative of the difference in mentality that companies have now. The first one is absolutely unaware of all the changes, all the VUCA world dynamics and is oblivious and will not be able to react. That has happened to famous companies like Kodak, Research in Motion or most to Thomas Cook, the travel company. The second one is a little bit better. His view is only about survival, “As long as I can outrun one of the others, I am still alive and that’s okay.” It’s the third one that engages his creative abilities, looks at the situation, doesn’t accept it’s supposed to be the outcome or its finality and does something unexpected and puts himself in control. That’s the first thing.
[bctt tweet=”Creativity is the most important leadership quality. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second is once the creativity of a leadership team is re-engaged or it was reawaken, it’s how to channel that and to apply it systematically. There is a definite process that I use and the heart of that is this notion that what every single company needs to focus on is the customer experience. What do you deliver? That goes across from the sales process, marketing, all the way to delivery and the maintenance of that relationship. That’s why that whole spectrum is critical. How do you achieve optimal customer experience across all those different phases? This is where the concept of customer infatuation comes in.
My premise is that any received service or product creates a flood of emotional response on the part of the target audience but that response by nature is fleeting. It only lasts for a certain interval of time, a temporary period because, after a while, the customers will take whatever you gave them that they were excited about as the new normal as the status quo and they will no longer be excited by it. What perfectly captures this cyclicality is the idea of infatuation. What I talked about is you can see this cycle in fast motion with children because children always get fascinated about the next toy.
In my case, my son Max was obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and all the different trains in the collection. Fascinatingly, as soon as he got the next train that he had to have, which could have been Percy or some of the other Thomas friends. Within minutes, he would go back to the catalog and now select the next one that he had to have and couldn’t live without. It’s that cyclicality that you can capture and understanding that is the absolutes engine for any company to keep their customers emotionally close to them throughout that whole relationship from sales and marketing all the way to ongoing maintenance of a relationship.
It sounds like it’s crucial for everyone whether you’re a one-person operation or big company, let’s say like Starbucks to keep coming up with something new to get your customer infatuated with the new version of whatever it is like Starbucks, for example. At certain times of the year, it has a special limited edition pumpkin spice for Halloween or what have you. That’s their way of doing that. Is that what you’re talking about?
[bctt tweet=”All of us have this inner child that’s full of curiosity, adventure, and wanting to do new things, but we get disconnected as we grow older. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Yes and some companies get this naturally and some stumble on it and do it from time to time. My whole point is this should be and can be done systematically. In fact, what I even talked about is that the initial period of elation when you get something that you’re excited about. It could be your new iPhone or a new flavor at Starbucks. That is when you enter what I call the infatuation interval. When you’re charged up, you’re emotionally connected and you’re almost blind to any of the shortcomings of the new offering.
As you gradually start to get used to that innovation, your emotional state starts to decline and you start to gradually notice things that you want to have even better, faster, more customized and fun. At one point, you transition into what I call the entitlement period, where you are no longer emotionally charged up and demand new features and new things that you can get excited about. What companies need to understand is, if they allow their customers to transfer from the infatuation interval to the entitlement period, that’s where they enter the danger zone of losing those customers who may migrate to other suppliers. The exciting part of this is that you can measure the infatuation interval of your customers and what I call the infatuation interval index.
There is now this capability using social media and big data in knowing exactly what emotional connectivity your customers are feeling to you. That’s measurable for any phase of your relationship. It could be for your sales process or marketing efforts. That’s the exciting part of the new frontier that if companies understand that they could be one of the future shapers and optimize the ongoing customer experience, there are no limits to how relevant and how magnetic they can become to their customers.
I see your Slingshot being able to solve two big problems in the world that I see happening. For people who are in sales, let’s face it, we’re all in sales. We’re selling ourselves to get hired, promoted, get our idea of committed or to sell a product or service. You’re in this process and clients are infatuated with, “This sounds great. We can’t wait to share this with my boss. Send us a proposal.” You’re like, “This is going to happen.” You’re all excited and all of a sudden, the infatuation wears off or they’re not returning phone calls.
Customer Service Satisfaction: If you get people’s affection, you have their attention. If you have their attention, that means you matter to them. If you matter to them, then you can stay relevant.
You can relate it to almost dating sometimes, “What happened here?” Somebody gets a new customer and they go, “This is great. Look at all these new customers.” You start looking under the hood and you say, “We’re only retaining 30% of the people who come here to have a meal. Nobody’s coming back.” They were so infatuated. Do they settle on us or were they infatuated with our donut or whatever it was and now they don’t like it? How did we lose that magnetism?
This concept of reimagining how to be magnetic to a customer using your infatuation index is solving so many problems of somebody who went away and their interest when it faded. We didn’t know it was starting to fade and we certainly don’t know how to get it back. You’re solving the awareness problem and we know that’s half of any problem is being aware of what it is. The solution part of it is I’m guessing you have a whole strategy on how to win people back if you have in fact lost the initial infatuation.
Those are great observations and summaries of this entire space that I am promoting. John, you and I both give talks and you talk about the power of storytelling. You talked about getting salespeople from invisible to irresistible. That to me is an excellent complement to both of those topics to what I am talking about. I started our conversation by saying something that probably caught your attention or would catch anyone’s attention which is, “Here’s a fun fact. I was the youngest person on earth.” “That’s interesting that now you have my attention.” As a speaker, what do you do? With that attention span and positive charge, you’ve got to start any relationship but be it on stage or you’re talking to a prospective client or customer on a high note to get their attention. Also, to get their emotional connectivity. How long will that give you?
If I then go into my speech on stage and the next few minutes is boring, I’m not infatuating you. At what point will I lose your attention? That’s the same process in sales, marketing and providing a product throughout that whole process. It’s a real concept and it’s in relationships as well. As long as we are emotionally connecting with our target audience, we have their attention and we have a good chance in the business of winning their business. As soon as that fades, we are letting them go. Our golden opportunity is to keep them re-infatuated and understanding that there’s no such thing as a perfectly or continuously satisfied customer. That doesn’t exist, but we can invent a new way to keep them charged up and do that over and over again. That’s a wonderful platform for innovation and always reimagining boundaries.
[bctt tweet=”Creativity is something that’s just dormant that we can reconnect and then systematically apply. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
We have decided to team up on this because I believe that infatuation is a kissing cousin of irresistible and creating a master class for companies who want to reimagine how to become magnetic to their ideal customers. One of the things we’re going to be talking about in the master class is how to turn customer pain points into points of infatuation. Do you have a story or an example that you want to tantalize someone with and want them to learn more about how that would work?
One quick and easy example is from the airline industry. We can all agree that airline travel is full of pain points where we feel frustrated, discomfort and disconnect from the airline and in our experience. We can also agree that the middle seat is the worst seat on an airplane. If you ever get the middle seat, you feel that that you are the sucker and you’re not going to a good flight. That’s a classic pain point. Spirit Airlines announced they were going to reconfigure their seating. What they’re going to do is make the middle seat the widest. Imagine that transformation from a point of pain to a point of infatuation and smartly and psychologically, they only increased the size of the middle seat by a single inch. That’s enough to make it so that in the traveler’s mind, they need to desire the middle seat because it’s the widest.
You’re taking what was before a pain point, you’re only not removing it or saying, “From now on, we’re no longer offering a middle seat because everybody hates it.” That’s impossible but you’re forming it into a point of infatuation where it now becomes the most desired seat on a plane. The other example, which is a fun one, I like to tell is, if you remember Nintendo’s Wii and it’s profound in the gaming industry. Basically, before Nintendo’s Wii that came out in 2006, the gaming industry was limited to 5% of the population, which was antisocial teenage boys. Everything in that space tries to compete with one another. Along comes Nintendo using Blue Ocean Strategy and says, “We’re going to let you fight over that 5% of the market. We’re going after the 95% who never had an interest in video games.”
Why? What was the key pain point? The answer was simple. People didn’t want to spend hours in front of a screen passively sitting. What did Nintendo do? They introduced the motion sensor and combined what everybody before thought was two separate things active playing with passive playing. By doing this, they transform the biggest pain point of non-customers into the biggest attraction and infatuation. All of a sudden, I can play golf, do skiing, and play tennis in my TV room. It was this innovation that transformed the entire gaming industry.
Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life
The story I tell is that a year into this to show the power of this infatuation, there was a story out of Florida where undercover police agents raided the house of someone suspected to be a drug dealer. The surveillance videos in the house, unbeknownst to the policeman who entered, captured what they were doing. It shows the raiding team members coming into the living room and seeing a Nintendo Wii bowling on the screen that was left on. They were so infatuated by this game that they couldn’t resist. They started playing. They started bowling and getting excited by their results, forgetting all about this important clandestine mission that they were on. My point is that you can’t blame the officers. They were irresistibly still caught in the infatuation interval of the Wii that was created. That’s a great way of visually illustrating that magnetic power that you can create for your own products and services.
I love that analogy of Nintendo and Wii because when I was working with the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Vegas a few years ago when they were launching and coming up with their marketing and advertising, I said to them, “Who’s your competitor? Is it Bellagio?” They go, “No. We’re going after people who hate to come to Vegas.” I went, “Now that is a clever way to target people and a whole different way. It’s about art. It’s about this and that.” It’s not staying in that same competitive set. Now, there’s something called Vegas fatigue, where people aren’t going as much as they want. What Vegas decided that they need to do is create something completely new that’s only found in Vegas. That’s a new tagline.
They partnered with Madison Square Garden to create a sphere. It will be completely immersive that’ll be unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced in concerts and lots of product shows. When companies need our experience and exposure to other brands that are using this innovation, irresistibility and how to create customer magnetism, where’s the best way for people to find you? I know you have your own website as well as a site for the Slingshot. If you don’t mind sharing that.
I am much looking forward to you and I collaborating and launching this masterclass, which will be not just combining our expertise but you and I being on stage together, ad-libbing and injecting stories. We’re delivering not just content but an experience and immersing our audience in these stories as well. That’s a great combination and it’s so important because both you and I understand that it’s all about getting people’s affection. If you get people’s affection, you have their attention. If you have their attention, that means you matter to them and if you matter to them, then you can stay relevant and that’s where the game is played.
[bctt tweet=”What every single company needs to focus on is the customer experience. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I sometimes ask my clients, “If you asked your customers, would they say that you’re one of their favorite brands within the space that you operate in?” They may say, “Yeah, I’m in the top five or maybe I’m in number one.” I say, “How about if you ask them are you their favorite brand across all possible company in this space?” If you’re not, then why not? That should be your mission and your goal. It’s the same way that you said about Vegas. That’s a great example. This is not about competing for other hotels on the strip. This is about making Vegas relevant and matter and putting you as the curator and purveyor of that. I love that. In terms of finding me, if people google me, I have a website and LinkedIn, I’m pretty active on them. Hopefully when you and I start doing our thing together and we’ll have our own website or ways of finding that as well.
That’s GaborGeorgeBurt.com. The book again is called Slingshot: Re-imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life. Thank you so much for sharing your creativity. Everyone I know is already infatuated with you learning what you’ve already shared.
Thank you, John. You’re a pleasure to talk with and I look forward to us doing things together.
Important Links
- Sameer Somal
- Slingshot
- Blue Ocean Strategy – Book
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- World Marketing Forum
- LinkedIn – Gabor George Burt
- GaborGeorgeBurt.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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The Blueprint – Lift Your Leadership To New Heights With Doug Conant
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Being an effective leader isn’t always about being a tough leader—there’s a distinction. What distinguishes an effective leader from a tough leader is knowing when to be tough, and when to be a kind ear, a sensitive ear, for the people who work with you. Doug Conant has been a high-ranking executive at multiple world-class global companies, and is the founder of Conant Leadership. Doug sits down with John Livesay to discuss what makes an effective leader, and how to bring out those qualities in every leader. Feel like you’ve hit a wall in terms of the way you’re leading people? Let Doug help you navigate through the process the best way you can.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Blueprint – Lift Your Leadership To New Heights With Doug Conant
Our guest is Doug Conant. He’s an internationally renowned business leader, the New York Times best-selling author, a keynote speaker, and a social media influencer with over 40 years of leadership experience at world-class global companies. For many years of his leadership journey, he’s honed his leadership craft at the most senior levels. First as President of Nabisco Food Company, then as CEO of Campbell Soup Company, and finally, as Chairman of Avon Products. In 2011, he founded ConantLeadership, a mission-driven community of leaders and learners who are championing leadership that works in the 21st century. Doug, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here.
The Blueprint: 6 Practical Steps to Lift Your Leadership to New Heights
We have a lot of friends in common and share a publicist. You have this new wonderful book that I’m excited to have an early galley of called The Blueprint: 6 Practical Steps to Lift Your Leadership to New Heights. We’re going to do a deep dive, I’m sure people are going to want to get a copy of that. Before that, I would love to take us back to your own story of origin. Did you always know as a young person that you wanted to become a big leader in all these companies? You can go back as far as you want, childhood, high school or college, whatever you think that sparked the fire that became Doug Conant.
I grew up in a small town outside of Chicago, in the distant suburbs of Chicago. No, I did not have any grand plan. It turned out, I was an introverted kid. Surprisingly, I’m still a bit introverted. I took to the game of playing tennis where I could hit the ball against the wall by myself and not talk to anyone. I loved doing that for hours and hours. Ultimately, I became a good tennis player. I attended Northwestern University on a tennis scholarship that paid for my education. I stayed on to help coach at Northwestern and went straight through to graduate school. I got my MBA at Kellogg in 1975. I then went into the world of business.
A story about that, my advisor at the Kellogg’s school was the father of the marketing book of the twentieth century, Philip Kotler. He wrote Introduction to Marketing and he talked about the five Ps. He was the marketing godfather of a whole generation of leaders. I don’t know if you remember the scene from The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, where he’s at a pool. He’s just graduated college and these older men are putting their arms around him and asking him what he’s going to do. This one fellow comes up, puts his arm around him and says, “I’ve got one word for you, plastics.” Dustin Hoffman looked at him rather quizzically and never went into the world of plastics. That scene always stuck with me.
[bctt tweet=”Get Rid Of Your Mask” username=”John_Livesay”]
Not knowing which way was up in my life at the time, I’m with professor Kotler. He metaphorically puts his arm around me and says, “Doug, I have two words for you, brand management.” That was the hot button in the last quarter of the last century. I followed his advice and I went into brand management. I was recruited up to General Mills, which was one of the three companies that were leading the way in terms of the practice of brand management. It’s a marketing discipline. It’s a way of marketing your brand to consumers through the consumer’s eyes, not through the manufacturer’s eyes. I went and did that.
I had my first performance review there, five months into my job. My boss wrote up my evaluation and his boss had to write one line that said I read the report and signed it. My boss’s boss one line was, “You should be looking for another job,” and then he signed his name. Meanwhile, I had moved up to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I did not know a soul, from Chicago. I’m thinking, “My life is exploding and I haven’t even started it yet.” I persevered through that and that was healthy for me because I had a challenge and I rose through the challenge.
I went through there and ultimately transferred out to Boston, which was another risky move. They were the world’s largest toy manufacturer at the time, General Mills, and they owned Parker Brothers. I went out to work for Parker Brothers Choice and Games. I had a great run for three years. They spun the company off, one day, I went into work, the receptionist said, “Doug, the senior vice president would like to see you.” I went up to his office and he said, “Doug, your position has been eliminated. You need to be out of here by noon today.” Nine years of my career with General Mills was over in a snap. I went home to my wife, my two small children, and my one large mortgage, feeling every bit of the victim. That was the illustrious start to my career. I’ve been told that I should look for another job, and ultimately I was being fired.
Being An Effective Leader: Getting in touch with yourself is absolutely essential to every leader.
That alone, there’s so much to unpack and then we want to continue this story. I also grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I grew up in Elk Grove Village outside of O’Hare Airport and we used to wave at the planes. I used to swim competitively and that is also an individual sport for the most part. You’re in the water by yourself, you might be part of the team but were doing your thing. Do you think you learned any leadership lessons subconsciously hitting that tennis ball over and over against the wall? Whether it be discipline or focus, any takeaways from that, now looking back?
I wrote a blog on life lessons learned from the game of tennis. I had a baker’s dozen life lessons and absolutely, I did learn a lot. First of all, I got more in touch with myself, which is essential for every leader. I learned how to compete, how to perform under pressure. Also, through tennis and in teaching tennis, I learned how to engage with people who were hungry to get some help. Tennis was foundational to the start of my life in business. Competitive sports help that, you have to move beyond it. It proved to be a great foundation. When I was working, I would see people, when we were starting our careers, wilting under the pressure because they were so anxious. I was more comfortable. I was still an introvert, not quite comfortable, but I was good enough to be able to hold my own under pressure. In the fullness of time, I became comfortable.
I talk about that all the time, people get butterflies in their stomach especially when they have to present in front of their peers. I tell people that the goal is not to get rid of the butterflies but to get them to fly in formation. You talked about the five Ps, one of them is not plastic, just for the readers. It’s price, packaging, promotion, and all that good stuff. You said something about your lessons learned at General Mills, which is important no matter what the industry is. That is, “Market through the consumer’s eyes and not the manufacturer’s eyes.” That I saw happening in the computer industry, in the dot-com boom. They would make some hardware then assume that somebody was going to figure out how to use it. If you start from the consumer’s perspective, that’s valuable. What was happening that made that boss write, “You should look for another job?” Was that a shock or did you anticipate that?
I came off the tennis tour. I had taken three months off. My first day of work at General Mills, I had a khaki suit, a yellow shirt, a big wide tie. I had something that most of your followers wouldn’t know, brown Earth shoes on. I had an afro, a full man shoe, and a tan line from where my headband had been. I went to work at a place where everybody was wearing white shirts and blue pinstripe suits. It was a rude awakening and I had never worked in an office before. I had a slow start and I worked hard. I was bright enough to do it, but I had to get acculturated. The first three months were tough, the next few months, I started to hit stride. My boss saw that, but his boss didn’t see beyond first impressions. His boss was not particularly sensitive to my situation. He didn’t care. He got my attention.
The other thing you and I share is I had a career at Condé Nast and got laid off after years back in 2008. You were at GM. I actually did a whole TEDx Talk on being a lifeguard of your own life. This concept of resilience, how do we bounce back when we get our identity so tied up with our career? I’m fascinated to let you continue the story of you coming home, you have this big mortgage and children to support. You’ve got to lick your wounds and not stay a victim.
What we covered triggers one more thought around looking at the world through the eyes of the consumer. That’s also how I believe you have to lead. Looking through the eyes of the people you’re leading. You have a clear sense of direction, and you have a sense of purpose. You have a philosophy about leadership, but you do have to look through the eyes of the people you’re leading because leaders need followers. You need to be viewing the world through the eyes of your followers so that you can adjust your leadership accordingly. The consumer marketing perspective has helped me with a leadership perspective. In terms of when I lost my job, the best thing that happened to me is that they sent me to an outplacement counselor that afternoon.
I called him and he answered the phone. “My name is Neil McKenna. How can I help?” Neil McKenna became a mentor in my life. That one day had the lowest moment in my career when I was fired, and one of the highlights of my career was meeting Neil McKenna on the same day. I’m old, this is before caller ID or cellphone. When I called Neil, every time he answered the phone, he would say, “Hello, this is Neil McKenna. How can I help?” You could have been the plumber and he would be saying that. What he did by just saying that is, it welcomed you in. He created a platform for conversation where he was listening to where you were coming from. I went over there and he guided me through an outplacement process which was difficult for an introvert.
He led me through a process that strongly influences the thinking in our book The Blueprint. He helped me get in touch with the real me. I was struggling just like most of us, there was the work me and me beyond work. They were two different people. I posted a small little piece from Warren Buffett on LinkedIn and Twitter. Basically, I said, “Get rid of the mask.” You need to be one with who you are personally and professionally. It needs to be one. I believe that and Neil helped me get to a place where I could show up authentically and also continue to grow and contribute in an increasing way, because authenticity alone, I find is not enough.
You need to know what you’re doing too. You need to keep growing into your leadership. You’re getting a little better tomorrow than you are today. With Neil’s help, I found that when you marry this notion of authenticity with the concept of growth, you can lift your leadership to new heights in a very practical way. That strongly influenced the book. The only other thing I’m just touching on Neil McKenna. Since I worked with Neil, I have brought a how I can help mentality to every day I go to work. Every time I’m at home, I’m at church it’s, how can I help? That’s the lens that I choose to look through life at, and it’s been life-changing for me.
In the introduction to The Blueprint book, you talk about the raw materials of change that are already within you. You quote Arthur Ashe, of course, the famous American tennis player, “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” The irony for me reading that, Doug, was that I quote, Arthur Ashe in my keynotes about confidence. He is also known to say, “The key to success is confidence, and the key to confidence is preparation.” We both admire him and use his philosophy in different ways. Yours is about leadership. Mine is about selling. When I opened your book, and I saw that quote, I thought, “I am so excited to read this and so excited to interview you.” When you click with certain people, you don’t always know why. When you have all these signals, and that was one question I wanted to ask you. Did you notice similarities between Nabisco, Campbell Soup and Avon, that those skillsets that you could apply across all those different companies of what it takes in addition to this authenticity, and the power of can I help mindset?
First of all, Arthur Ashe, I was on his foundation, and I worked with his wife. He’s a member of what I call my entourage, people I carry with me, who even though they may not be with us, they are with me in spirit. Arthur is one of those people because he achieved excellence in my sport, but he also transcended that sport with his civility and his desire to be a social change agent. He showed that all things are possible. I strongly believe that as well. You can’t go wrong if you walk in Arthur Ashe’s shoes if only for a moment in time. The key I found, in terms of across all of my work experiences and we talked about three companies, but every day is a new adventure. With a new meeting, a new group, a new stakeholder, and different boards I was on. I found that the key to having an impact was being tuned in to the here and now with a clear sense of where we were trying to go long-term.
I’ve written about this need to be a leadership time traveler. We actually have to perform. To be effective leaders, we’ve got to be brilliant in three time zones at the same time. We have to remember and honor the past. We have to perform in the present in such a way that we don’t compromise the future. Every effective leader has got to be thinking three time zones, across everything they do. I thought Arthur did that, he was effective in the present, but he saw a need to do things better in the future. He championed that while saying, “The present isn’t good enough, but it’s where we are, and we can make it better tomorrow.” He kept putting one foot in front of the other in an inspiring way. That was true at Nabisco, at Campbell Soup Company, and at Avon.
The other thing I would say, which will connect to the book, you’ve got to be incredibly connected to who you are. Stuff is coming at you seventeen ways from Sunday. We all feel as if we’re trying to get a sip of water from the fire hydrant of life every day. Think of a fire hydrant cap coming off, and this water is just washing over you. That’s life in nowadays world. You don’t have time to think about, “How am I supposed to respond to this with my professional self?” You don’t have time to play the game. In my opinion, you have to be incredibly in tune with who you are. You have to be able to respond to these challenges authentically. Most people, I have found, are not in touch with who they are. They’re not in touch with their many gifts, they haven’t done the self-exploration required to be able to show up on demand in a way that’s highly authentic.
[bctt tweet=”Be A Leader That Time Travels” username=”John_Livesay”]
What I have found is one of the first steps to becoming a better leader is to envision where you want to go but then to reflect deeply on your life experiences and harvest those to show, “How do I want to walk in the world? What cues from my past have influenced me in my life?” I’ve talked about two of them. I’ve talked about Neil McKenna, and how can I help. We just talked about Arthur Ashe and do what you can with where you are. I carry those lessons with me personally. They resonate with me being who I am. It makes it much easier to show up with people because I know where I’m coming from. I’ve spent the time reflecting and getting in touch with the leader I want to be as opposed to trying to be the leader I think I’m supposed to be every minute of the day.
Being An Effective Leader: If the present isn’t good enough, you have to realize that that’s where you are, and you have to make it better tomorrow.
You have a boot camp every quarter on leadership where you talk about being authentic, which we’ve covered, as well as this integrated approach that lets you lead. You have something called the ConantLeadership Flywheel. Can you touch on that? Give us a little sample of what people would get if they took the boot camp and this Flywheel?
What’s cool about boot camp and the flywheel is tangential to that conversation, but I’ll connect it. With the boot camp, it takes about nine hours of pre-work to do this, you’ve got to invest time because I’m only with them for two days. We have a lot to cover. They do nine hours of pre-work reflecting on their past and drawing out highlights, trying to get in touch with their life story. They come and work with me. We try and pick that life story apart to a point where they can draw conclusions about, “Here’s the leader I would like to be based on all the positive life experiences I’ve had.” The grandfather listened to me when nobody else would. The outplacement counselor who said, “How can I help?” The good boss who said, “I’ve got your back.”
We harvest those lessons and we help them create their own leadership model. I believe in this concept of authenticity so powerfully that each one of us has our leadership philosophy, our own leadership model. In two days, we help them harvest all these learning, do a little studying and create their own leadership model. The one on the ConantLeadership Flywheel happens to be my model. It doesn’t work for a lot of people, but it works for me and that’s all that matters. I can go into any situation, looking at the world through that lens, which is my lens, diagnose any situation and come up with, “Here’s how I want to approach it.” In my case, I have eight components, three are at the heart of my model and that’ll be captured in The Blueprint. It’s not up on the website yet.
I have three core components. The first one is, honor people. The second ring is, inspire trust. The third ring is, clarify a higher purpose. Every time I go into an engagement anywhere, I’m focused on honoring people, building trust, and being clear about why I’m there. I then have five pieces that operate around those three rings. One starts by creating direction, getting organizational alignment, building vitality, executing with excellence, and producing extraordinary results. I can go into any leadership challenge, diagnose a situation, figure out where it fits on my model, and come up with a way to approach the challenge.
It gives people a roadmap, especially if they recently got promoted or they’re leading a different group of people than they’ve ever led before. Having this flywheel allows them to say, “What do I need to dial in here to respond to this new challenge?”
Yeah, but they don’t design their flywheel. I have a flywheel. I had a fellow who worked with me, who had a son who could do a Rubik’s Cube in under two minutes. He decided that his model was going to be a Rubik’s Cube, he was trying to solve a puzzle with every challenge. That cube has six sides and those six sides were the six things that he thought about when he was trying to lead. That’s how he managed it in a way that spoke to him in a special way. All my students have to send me a video of them presenting their model. They have to be able to present their model in two minutes so they can demonstrate that they’re fluent with it and get to the high points of it.
He sent me his video and in the lower part of the screen, he had his son doing the Rubik’s Cube. It was a bit distracting but it communicated clearly. Everybody has their own way of looking at this. I’ve had people who are gardeners. I’ve had some women who are gifted. Gifted gardeners who think about preparing the earth, trying to take care of the garden, pruning it back, making sure all the elements are coming in so the plants can flourish, taking care of the roots before they can get the fruits. Those models speak to them in a deep and personal way. The way we construct their models, they leverage all their life learnings so that those learnings support the language they’re using to talk about. All of a sudden, they have a story, and they have a metaphor for leadership that’s uniquely theirs.
One of my former boss, Nina Lawrence, she was a publisher at Condé Nast. She’s an avid gardener and is constantly posting pictures of getting the last fresh flowers of the season. She lives up in Connecticut. All of that, I had never thought of before, in terms of tending the team she managed and getting the most out of all of us like she got the most out of her garden. It’s fascinating to hear you mention that analogy.
It’s incredibly powerful in a busy world where you’re always on and you have to be able to respond in a way you can feel good about on-demand. The other piece of this is, it’s great that I have my leadership model, but that’s not good enough. The people I work with need to know where I’m coming from. They’re not mind readers. The reason I have these people do these two-minute videos is, we encourage them to find a way to share their philosophy with the people with whom they live and work. Everybody who works with me knows that I’m all about honoring people and inspiring trust because I’ve told them. You cannot assume they’re going to know. Most of us, as leaders, are assumptive.
We forget that these people have busier lives than we do. They’re not sitting waiting on the edge of their seat to read our minds, to know where we’re coming from as leaders. It’s our obligation to create clarity in the relationship and to tell them. I also have our folks invite the people they work with to tell them how they think. It’s not a one-way street. It’s a two-way street. All of a sudden, we have this higher understanding of where we’re each coming from, with more clarity around our leadership, we become more effective, more efficient. We’re able to act with integrity with everything we do because we’re doing what we said we’d do.
You talked about bringing courage down to earth in The Blueprint book. Using courage that we have to lead with integrity, authenticity, and a tough mind on standards, and yet with a tender heart towards people. My question is, how does someone toggle between the tough mind on standards and still being tender-hearted towards people?
I grew up a big Chicago Bears fan. I grew up in Glencoe. When I was growing up, George Halas was the coach of the Chicago Bears and Vince Lombardi was the coach of the Green Bay Packers. The predominant mindset was you’ve got to be tough. It wasn’t okay to be tender at all, I was never comfortable with that. I found I always connected better with people and was more effective when I was sensitive to where they were coming from. It just didn’t make any sense to be tough and intimidating all the time, especially knowing that I’d be polluting that relationship when I wasn’t in the room. I started this language about being tough-minded on standards and tender-hearted with people years ago. I found that the key to this whole thing is having what Stephen Covey, one of my mentors would say is an abundance mentality.
To be a leader, you do have to be tough-minded on standards and you need to be tender-hearted with people so they’ll engage in the journey with you. It’s not either/or, it’s both. Jim Collins, another friend used to say, “Doug, you’ve got to embrace the genius of the end, and you’ve got to reject the tyranny of the or.” I’m listening to this and it makes so much sense to me. As a leader, you don’t have a choice, you have to maintain high standards. I would also assert that if you want to be a leader that has an enduring impact with an organization, you don’t have a choice, you also have to be sensitive to the needs of people. I’ve spent a whole career doing both. It’s hard sometimes, but it’s what’s demanded.
You also talked about in the book, The Blueprint, the anatomy of leadership competence. There are three cues of competence. There’s intellectual, IQ, we all are familiar with that, and taking the test. Then there’s the big buzzword that’s been around for a while, emotional intelligence, which is all of this importance with your ability to show empathy and not just react. The one you talk about is FQ, which I’m less familiar with, which is functional intelligence. I would love you to describe it a little bit. If you wouldn’t mind, the second part of my question is, how did the IQ, EQ and FQ all work together?
First of all, if we go back to tough-minded on standards and tender-hearted with people, the IQ piece has to do with assessing a situation and looking at the cold, hard facts and processing information quickly and clearly, thinking through an issue. The emotional intelligence requires thoughtfulness but also feeling your way through the issue. That’s more of the tender-hearted with the people side of the equation. The third piece that we’re talking about, FQ, is something that I made up. I call it the functional quotient. You also have to know what you’re doing with your discipline.
If you wanted to be brilliant at a podcast, you have to have good IQ because you’ve got to process a lot of stuff quickly. You have to have good EQ because you have to connect with whoever you’re interviewing and your audience. You have to have good FQ, you have to know how to run a fine podcast. You need to know the discipline of a podcast. I was put in a sales role once, which was hilarious because I was an introvert and couldn’t play golf. I didn’t know the sales discipline well, but I had good IQ. I could think through things.
I had good EQ, I could feel my way through things. That’s enough initially, I have found to be able to go into any situation. Ultimately, if you’re in charge of discipline, whatever discipline it is, you have to be a student of that discipline in order to reach full proficiency. I found that FQ is essential if you want to start to contribute fully to whatever discipline you’re working in. It’s not good enough just to be a generalist, to be smart and to be feeling. You need to know what you’re talking about too, unlike our friends in Congress these days.
Being An Effective Leader: Every time you go into an engagement anywhere, you have to focus on honoring people, building trust, and being clear about why you’re there.
There are many ways people can interact with you. If you go to ConantLeadership.com, you can find the book, The Blueprint, so people can buy the book. They can also explore on the website whether the boot camp is something for their team. You’re a keynote speaker, you’re the only former Fortune 500 CEO who has a New York Times best-selling book, a Top 50 Leadership Innovator, and a Top 100 Leadership Speaker. As if that’s not enough, you’re also the Top 100 Most Influential Authors in the world. A lot of companies are bringing you in to talk to them on a variety of topics. The one that I resonate with is championing engagement to win in the workplace, that the soft stuff is the hard stuff. Doug, is there anything, one last thought you want to leave us with on any one or all three of those areas?
In nowadays world, I’ve been doing this a long time and it’s an old buzzword now, but the key to success is to create a high-engagement culture. I have found, if as a leader you get engaged in the lives of the people with whom you work, they will become engaged in the agenda of the enterprise. Quite frankly, it doesn’t work any other way. If you want them fully engaged, they’ve got to know you have their back and they’ve got to know you’re paying attention and that you care, but that you also have high standards. It’s not just, let’s hold hands and sing Kumbaya. They want to know they’re associated with an enterprise that has high standards, that performs but cares about its people, too. You can do that.
[bctt tweet=”Inspire Trust In Order To Lead” username=”John_Livesay”]
The key to success is to become well-anchored as a leader in who you want to be and how you want to show up. Commit to bringing more authenticity to the workplace, and commit to growing in your ability to contribute, and then contributing in ways that help the enterprise move forward. That is a winning proposition. I would say, each one of us, as individuals, owes it to ourselves and the people with whom we work, to be the best version of ourselves we can be. These people are counting on us. I treat this whole leadership conversation and leadership in total as a craft. We are walking on sacred ground, we are affecting people’s lives every day. We owe it to them to be the best version of ourselves. Everything in The Blueprint is leading us to a place where we can become the best versions of ourselves.
I’ll close on one last thought related to it is, what’s different about The Blueprint and my philosophy is, it’s anchored in the real world. I’m not someone who talks about leadership but has never led anything. It’s written by someone who’s been there and done that for over 40 years. Started out at the lowest level you could at an organization and worked his way up through a variety of trying circumstances. What I brought to it is a degree of pragmatism that the change process we talked about is actually designed to fit in the middle of your cockamamie life without changing a thing.
If you think about all the people that go on diets after the holidays, “I’m going to get my diet under control, and I’m going to lose twenty pounds.” About one month into it, they say, “I can’t sustain this, it doesn’t fit into my life.” We’ve taken that into account. This is the first process I know that has taken into account the crazy life we lead and is designed to help you become a leader in a way that fits in the middle of your cockamamie life. That’s what I’m most proud of. It’s a practitioner’s eye towards the evolution of you as a leader.
If you want to get unstuck and get a blueprint book that’s going to show you how to be the best version of yourself, this is a book for you. Thanks again, Doug.
Good luck to you.
Important Links
- The Blueprint: 6 Practical Steps to Lift Your Leadership to New Heights
- Boot camp – ConantLeadership
- ConantLeadership
- Introduction to Marketing
- Blog – 13 Life Lessons from the Game of Tennis
- ConantLeadership Flywheel
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Lingo – Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language With Jeffrey Shaw
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Understanding your audience is at the core of creating a successful business in today’s fast-paced world. It’s become easier and easier for audiences to move on if they feel that a brand doesn’t really try to understand what they need. Jeffrey Shaw, the author of LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible, joins John Livesay about this essential element of catering to your audience. Businesses can’t grow if they don’t find ways to keep up with their audience. Let Jeffrey take you through how you can best work towards creating a full-fledged understanding of what your audience wants from you.
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Listen to the podcast here
Lingo – Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language With Jeffrey Shaw
Our guest is Jeffrey Shaw. One of the reasons I’m excited to have Jeffrey on the show is he’s going to help us figure out how to stop wasting time on customers that will never appreciate us. For more than three decades, Jeffrey’s been one of the most sought-after portrait photographers in the US. His portraits have appeared on The Oprah Show, People Magazine, and have been even seen at Harvard University. Jeffrey’s going to share with us about how to make your customers feel seen, heard and understood like a photographer sees their subject. When that happens, you’ll attract and retain your ideal customers by learning to speak their LINGO, which happens to be the name of his book. When he’s not hosting waffle Sundays at his home in Miami, then he is a Brand Consultant, the host of the Creative Warriors podcast and a TEDx speaker. His book is called LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible. Welcome, Jeffrey.
John, I’m thrilled to be here with you.
You are a keynote speaker, photographer and author. There are many great things about you that the readers are going to love knowing about. Let’s start with your own story of origin. I’d like to know the story of how you became interested in becoming a photographer.
My original interest was it seemed like the ideal thing to do as a young kid that I’m afraid of the world. I was a shy child until my twenties. In my teen years, that seemed like the ideal hobby because there’s a thing. There’s this box between you and the world. Of course, back in the day, a lot of the activity involved a darkroom, which I loved because you could isolate yourself in the dark. The darkroom was my survival technique through high school. I was fortunate that my father enjoyed photography as a hobby. We had a darkroom in the house, so that introduced me initially to the chemistry. Up to this day, I’d love to bake and I love to landscape. A common denominator with all these things that I am passionate about is the chemical interaction between art and science. That’s the root of the passion. That’s something I picked up as a teen and have been doing ever since.
Understanding Your Audience: You have to believe there’s an audience of people out there who will value what you do. It’s your job to find them.
An interesting hook that I wasn’t anticipating as part of your answer is the chemistry, this whole combination of a catalyst that triggers the reaction. I vividly remember that in school and being fascinated by something being a catalyst. Of course, in the business world, whether you have chemistry or not with your team or with your customers, it’s that vibe of, “Does something click or not?” In the dating world, I remember reading that when you kiss somebody, you’re smelling them. The chemistry between two people in a romantic situation has to do with pheromones and there is actual science to it. Let’s talk about chemistry as far as what you’ve learned being a portrait photographer and how important it is to have chemistry with the people you’re photographing.
It’s such an intimate experience photographing. On my job, I did all portraits on location. I was going to their homes, beach or second homes. Most of my clients have multiple homes. It’s such an intimate experience, not just being photographed, but also gaining the trust of our customers in a way of having them open up their lives and their homes to prepare for a portrait session. It’s almost more intimate than the actual act of being photographed because people are going to ask you, “What do you think I look best in? How do you think I should dress?” People are opening themselves up in a vulnerable way asking for your input into what’s going to bring out the best in them. I always appreciated that. I loved being a photographer.
There were things that I loved about it, but at the end of the day, the camera was my vehicle to have amazing relationships with people. I have found that to be a common denominator for one amongst successful photographers, we used to call it the dirty little secret in the industry, which is those of us that were the most successful in the industry tended to see what we did as a vehicle for something bigger. It wasn’t that we were photography nuts. We weren’t the people that were going to conferences with cameras on our neck. We were the ones that were there to allow the people we are interacting with to help us grow and be bigger at what we were doing. At the end of the day, the camera was just a vehicle. I find that to be true of some of our most purpose-driven entrepreneurs.
[bctt tweet=”You need to speak the same lingo as your customers in order to be successful.” username=”John_Livesay”]
How did you go from having a special place in your home to develop photography, to becoming known for getting relatively successful, even sometimes famous people to agree to hire you? There are some lessons here in a landscape full of photographers and especially now, everyone thinks they’re a photographer because of the iPhones. What did you do to get yourself to stand out as a place where people can trust your taste level and take the best picture of them?
I grew up in a small country town. It’s a couple of hours in North of New York City in New York State. I grew up lower to the middle class. That’s the reality of it. I had no expectations. I would ultimately be a family photographer for the most affluent families in my country. What changed everything for me was going back to my hometown after I went to a photography school. Quite honestly, I went to photography school because I had no guidance from my parents. Some people have helicopter parents. I had parents that forgot that I lived at home from the age of fourteen and on. I was the youngest, which is okay. I was the youngest of three boys and I was easy. I was the kid that nobody ever had to worry about. I never got in trouble. I was quiet.
I was left on my own and I didn’t have any guidance. University College wasn’t something I thought about. I went off to photography school. It was during that one year, I gained the confidence that this is potentially a career, although I couldn’t imagine what it could be. I returned to my hometown and that was the pivotal moment. I went back to this hometown with big aspirations, not that I was going to be super successful, but big aspirations that I felt being a photographer was important. Therefore, I commanded what I felt was a high price, certainly for that area.
The problem was three years in, it was a complete failure. I go through all the things like, “Am I not good enough?” My biggest fear was this is all I knew. I’ve been into this business for years and the only education I have is being a photographer. The real reason it wasn’t working is why I wrote my book LINGO. The turning point moment when I realized that the reason my business wasn’t working is I was not speaking the same lingo of the people that I was trying to serve. It was such a big division. The reason photography is valuable and important is because it’s something we hand down from generation to generation.
Being the youngest of three boys to this day, I have found one photograph of my childhood. I know that it emotionally drove me to feel it was important to have the moments of our lives preserved. These are the ideas I was promoting to these potential clients in my hometown that they should invest in photographs to hand down from generation to generation. They should invest in preserving their children’s memories. The problem was this is a community that’s struggling to get by a month every month, so investing isn’t part of their lingo. Responsibility for their children’s future is not part of their lingo. That was when I realized why I was failing.
It sounds like you were a little too high up on the Maslow hierarchy about self-actualization and legacy for someone who was still at the bottom rung of getting basic needs met.
I don’t know if you feel this way, but sometimes I wonder, “How does that happen?” This is where I was born into the world in that place to this family. To your point, I came into the world at a higher level of that pyramid. I had a completely different value system than my family because they said it was a lower-middle-class economic scale. Why did I have such value? I don’t know and I find that compelling and interesting, but I find that to be true because I work with creatives. I’ve taken surveys and I’ve asked people, “How many amongst us feel like we were the black sheep of our family?” Every hand goes up.
Surely, these cannot be my parents. It must have been some mistake at the hospital.
We prayed to find out that we were adopted, but to me that is a universal truth. The world needs that because we need people born into those situations to take everyone to the next level.
In LINGO, you talked about that your understanding of the affluent market came from watching Bing Crosby’s Christmas specials, so you weren’t in-sync. Did you change your language to the people in your town? Did you move to a town that cared about legacy and investing?
At the moment that my business was failing, I realized that it was the big question. Do I change everything about who I am, what I value and believe in to adapt to the market or do I fundamentally believe? I almost had no reason to believe this except in my absolute soul of soul and my gut. There’s an audience of people out there that will value what I do. They’re already out there and it’s my job to find them. The most tweeted moment on any of my keynotes is when I put up a slide that says, “It is not your job to prove your value to anyone. It is your job to find the people who already value what you do.” That shifts everything from a world of selling and convincing to taking on the higher-level responsibility of marketing and branding so that we put ourselves out in the world.
Also, the way that the people that we’re meant to serve to see us. That’s what I chose to do. I chose to say, “Instead of changing who I was, there must be people whose values were aligned with mine.” Ultimately, I realized that in order for their values to be aligned with mine, they had to have discretionary income. That’s how I led my way into the affluent market. Believe me, I had no experience or knowledge of what it meant to be affluent at that point in my life, but their value system was more closely related to mine. If you have the money, you can plan for the future. You invest. It’s part of your lingo.
Let’s talk about one of the stories that you shared with me about one of your clients, Stephanie Seymour, and why she wanted to have you photograph her family.
She’s definitely one of my most treasured clients and experience. Stephanie Seymour was one of the original supermodels with Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford. There’s even a portrait of them altogether. They were the models that even coined the term supermodel when models became a household name. She was Victoria’s Secret’s first breakout model. Everybody back in the ‘80s knew who she was. She was a recognizable and absolutely beautiful woman and inside as well. What most people don’t realize, she went on to have four kids in her life. She would hire me annually for many years to photograph her family.
Understanding Your Audience: Businesses that take the time to get the audience they want to reach will achieve their goals.
She’s been photographed by the world’s most famous photographers in the world. To have someone like you instead of Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon or whoever she’d been photographed by, is a huge deal. It completely ties into, “You spoke her lingo.”
I would walk into her bedroom helping her choose what to wear and there’s a nude portrait of herself by Richard Avedon in the bedroom and she’s hiring me. I asked her once, “Why me?” She said, “You have a way of seeing my family.” I had a way of seeing herself as a mom that these other photographers didn’t. Think about your experience as a well-known model. You must’ve come to wonder if anybody sees you for who you are because everybody’s just seeing the exterior. That was the difference. She was used to having been a model from her teen years. She was used to being seen for what the world saw on the outside. I saw something more. I saw a mom of four kids. I saw the relationship between her and her kids. I saw the relationship between the siblings and her husband. I saw all the relationships and I captured them. That’s why she felt that I saw her in a way that no other photographer had. That’s what she wanted to be portrayed in her family, photographs that she would share with her family and friends.
[bctt tweet=”You need to stand out to the right people.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What makes you special? What makes you picked to be the portrait photographer when people at her level have a lot of other relationships and choices? The takeaway here is that you have a way of seeing her that others don’t. As an entrepreneur, people hire you to come in to help them be better at attracting their ideal customers or clients. How are those lessons from a portrait photographer of helping people feel seen transferable to the entrepreneurial world? How does that lead to people hiring you as a speaker?
I love this part of the conversation because honestly, I’ve been spending years trying to unpack that. Sometimes, we don’t see the through-line where we come from and how it serves us today. For me, there are many layers to it. One is as a photographer, I’m used to not only seeing people and making them feel seen, but I’m also helping them see something in themselves. When you see someone gained confidence, it’s usually that they’re finding something in themselves that they didn’t see before. If I could be the facilitator of that, that’s an amazing thing. That applies as a photographer, brand consultant and speaker. As a speaker, there’s hardly anything more satisfying than seeing attendees of an audience in front of you get something you’re saying. You can see the visceral change in their expression and it’s more than just a nod of the head. You know when you’ve helped them see something in themselves that they didn’t see before.
Tell us about one of your ideal audiences where they had that a-ha moment that you’re referring to.
My ideal audience is a combination. My heart will always be with entrepreneurs because I love the entrepreneurial journey and how much heart entrepreneurs put into their businesses. At this stage of my career in business development and branding, I’m excited about working with companies and leaders because I like to see them have that same reaction. I’m beginning to see these walls being broken down between the whole B2B and the B2C world. I don’t even get it anymore. I’m embedded as an entrepreneur and has been a B2C type of business. What I’m seeing is the B2B world opening up to learning the entrepreneurial spirit and mind. Somehow, B2B has thought they are different. With the leaders that I speak in front of and I do workshops with, I’m seeing their eyes opening up to realizing that they’re B2B customers are just like B2C because, at the end of the day, we’re all humans.
Instead of thinking it’s all artificial intelligence talking to artificial intelligence. Jeffery, you have this wonderful coffee creamer story as part of your keynotes. It ties into making someone feel seen. Can you share a little bit about that story with us?
I love that you relate so much of your work to dating because I’ve always found that to be a useful tool as well. I was on a date and I observed that he took cream in his coffee and I drink my coffee black. At a later date, we had a casual diner. The waitress brought over the metal creamer and set it down in the middle, but almost a little bit more towards me. I immediately slid the creamer across the table and it was much an expression of, “This is for you,” because I had already observed that he took the cream and I did not. It was such an interesting reaction as his eyes were watching the motion of the creamer, but then he looked up with this look in his eyes like, “You get me.” It was the smallest gesture, but those are the ones that are always the most meaningful.
That’s what happens. We take that behavior into the business world where if you are having trouble standing out against a sea of competitors, the one that people are going to use and more importantly, stay loyal to are people who feel like, “You get us. That brand gets me. Therefore, I’m staying loyal to that brand,” whether it’s a hotel, a particular department store or whatever product or service you might be using. You have so many choices of stories to go to, whether it’s the Venice water taxi or Bergdorf Goodman. Tell us one of those, if you would.
Making your customers feel like you get them is the differentiator today. It’s only going to become more so because, with today’s technology-driven way of doing business, we’re often going to feel more distant. With my own concerns about businesses and how they use technology, which can be an incredibly useful tool, but the question I like to pose businesses is, “Using technology, will you make your customers feel like one in a million or one of a million?” The choice is yours and it’s going to make a difference as to whether you succeed or not.
Hopefully, it’ll only be the businesses that make their customers feel like one in a million that succeed. To understand the lingo of your ideal customers is to understand not just their values, behavior, and lifestyle, but these intimate ways in which they function. At the end of the day, if I looked at all my affluent clients, my photography clients, there are certain traits. We don’t want to judge people, stereotype people or put people in big buckets. However, there are certain behaviors that one can attribute to certain places of how they see themselves in the world.
Most affluent people are particular and detailed. They’re surrounded by a lot of staff and supportive people that can help them live their lives in a certain way. What I realized is that at the end of the day, the thing that was most important to them was being responsible because if you have money, money’s not an excuse. They can’t put two of their kids to Ivy League schools and the third one to community college. They can’t answer that. They can’t address that. I realized that their main lingo was the lingo of responsibility. Everything I did in my business spoke to the lingo of responsibility.
For example, one thing we did is we would produce these beautiful high-end holiday greeting cards. We’re talking about cards that were $10 apiece, and these are clients that are sending out 600, 700 or 1,000 of these cards. Big investment in holiday cards and my photographs would be on the front. Back in the old days, there were photographs mounted on the front and then when digital printing came along, the photographs were printed on the outside and maybe multiple photographs on the inside, all custom done. The smallest detail like the creamer of coffee would include in the box of cards and a pen that was a soft calligraphy nib, which the ink of the pen was as close as we could get to the recolor of the return address ink on the back of the envelope.
What I know of their lingo is that perfection is a big part of it and there’s no way they’re going to address or have someone else address the envelopes in black ink if the return addresses red, blue or green, which doesn’t match. We would give them that pen, it was a $2.50 pen and their faces, especially the first time they experienced it, would light up because of the amount of attention to detail. What I knew I was doing is helpful. I was saving them time from having to run around town to find that pen that I know that would be important to them. More than anything, it was the saving of time that I gave them. It was way more valuable than the pen. It saved them time and that meant the world to them.
Let’s share the story about the Venice water taxi because when you speak to someone’s lingo, that causes you to stand out.
At the time, it was funny how it stood out to me as an event in my life, but I wasn’t doing what I do in branding. It didn’t have the correlation, but it was one of those life moments that stood out. I was in Venice with my three kids and my kids were young at the time. It was our first European trip as a single dad and it was a big undertaking. I’m alone with three kids going to Europe and I don’t speak Italian, but this was the country you wanted to go to. We’re in Venice and we’re cruising down the Grand Canal in a crowded water taxi. If you’ve ever been in that experience, they’re packed and not all Europeans believe in deodorant.
[bctt tweet=”It’s your job to find the people who already value what you do.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s an intense environment and everyone around us is speaking Italian, which to my American ears sounds like white noise, a buzz. All of a sudden, someone on the taxi spoke English and my head whipped around. We made eye contact with that person with a smile. John, to this day, I would swear that the person’s voice was louder than everyone else. It was crystal clear to my English-speaking ears and I realized this is often how I even demonstrate what it means to speak someone’s lingo in the world. Because that person spoke my lingo, my native language, they stood out crystal clear. In today’s business world, standing out is not enough. We’ve been hearing that as an objective because we can stand out as being louder.
We can stand out by being dramatically different, but what’s the point of standing out if you haven’t taken the time to make sure it’s standing out to the right people and your ideal customers? That person could have stood out by speaking Italian louder, but they spoke out to me because they spoke my lingo. That is what makes lingo the most important strategy today because it’s a big world full of a lot of noise and a lot of messaging. Businesses will experience exponential growth in their businesses if they know who their ideal customers are. Who they’re meant to serve, who will love what they have to offer and learn to speak their lingo. That’s what cuts through the noise and raises a louder volume.
You have a lot of different keynote topics and I want to touch on a little bit on two. One is Life is an Everything Bagel: How to stop choosing between things and choose to have everything. What does this concept of having it all versus failure mean? Give us a little snapshot of who would want to hear that and one of the takeaways.
It’s a fun keynote for me. I was originally hired to give that keynote by an organization that wanted me to do to be the closing keynote. What they were looking for was how to inspire an audience to take action on what they had learned. I’d love it as both an opening and closing keynote because it’s one of the humorous because life is an everything bagel. The reason I use everything bagel as the metaphor is I envisioned what it must have been like when someone was in a kitchen and decided they didn’t want to choose between poppy seed, sesame seeds, raisins, garlic, and onion instead of saying, “I’m going to put everything in me in the batter.”
The creation of this talk came from when I was moving from New York to Miami because I was going through such trauma about not being a New Yorker and I realized, “Why do I feel like I’m being forced to choose? Why can’t I have everything? Why can’t I still be in New York or living in Miami? Why can’t I consider New York home and visit it often?” I don’t love how I tested this theory. I went to a burger joint once, a casual burger place like a lot of burger places, they had an endless number of different kinds of fries.
The waitress came over and I ordered my cheeseburger and she said, “What fries would you like with that?” I said, “What kinds do you have?” She said, “We have waffle fries, steak fries, curly fries, spicy fries, regular fries and sweet potato fries.” I said to her, “I’d like a little bit of all of them.” She goes, “You can’t do that.” I said, “I’m not asking for more fries. I just want a sampling of each of them.” She nervously responds like, “No, you can’t do that.” I was like, “Ask the chef. Maybe it’s possible. I bet you can do it.”
I wanted to pump her up a little bit. I wanted her to get this philosophy in life like, “Why am I being forced to choose? Why can’t I have everything?” Sure enough, a little while later, she came back and she was grinning from ear to ear giving me this burger with a little bit of a sample of all the fries. Let’s face it. They’re all premade. That is what this talk is about. It’s about learning to realize that in this black and white world, constantly forcing us to make a choice between things, when we stopped choosing between things is when we choose everything.
That’s important in business because many entrepreneurs have this experience as a roller coaster that we’re on. Often, the root of that roller coaster is because they’re unknowingly deciding, “Right now, I’m choosing to put all my attention and money towards my business. I’m neglecting my personal life and then I’m going to put all my attention towards my personal life, but my business is taking a slide. I’m putting all my attention towards the volume and not the price of services. I’m going to put all my attention to the price of services.” This is the route of why we experience this roller coaster and my philosophy is, “Why not choose to have everything instead of limiting your own thoughts?”
We understand now that speaking the right lingo is going to attract the right people and to help us stand out, but you have another keynote about how to attract and retain dream employees, not just customers and clients. That’s such a challenge for a lot of companies, especially the Millennials and younger. What is it that someone can do to speak the lingo of a Millennial versus someone else?
One of the key lessons in businesses today is about pivoting, but there’s a deeper level to pivoting. It’s paying attention to what needs you. When I wrote LINGO as a branding strategy, I joke about it in my HR keynotes that I have never had a job and I’ve never received a paycheck. Here I am speaking to HR, but I’m bringing this branding perspective into HR, which they desperately need. Every generation has had its differences and has misunderstood the generation following them. Honestly, I don’t know that there’s ever been such a dissonance between the generation that is typically doing the hiring and the generation of today’s workforce, which are the Millennials.
There are such huge misperceptions of Millennials and I have to have three of them as well. I’m a little more sensitive to this. It’s a key problem in HR because they’re not speaking of lingo. I’ll give you one example and it’s the recruiting process. Many companies recruit in such an old-fashioned way. It’s a lack of communication and this formal interview process. Even if a candidate gets in front of HR, there’s a lack of communication. There’s this old style of doing it. I go into companies and I refer to it as creating a frictionless recruiting process because the generation you’re speaking to, their lingo is frictionless.
LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible
We turn to Uber and Lyft, and the whole business model of technology is to create a frictionless experience. HR is like the fax machines of business practices and it’s a big problem in HR. If they want to get their dream employees, they need to develop the process itself to be more frictionless or more technology-driven. If they want the dream employees of today’s workforce, they need to think like them. They need to speak their lingo.
The takeaway I have is if you’re trying to target a tech Millennial and your application process, your whole interaction with them is a pleasant user experience as they call it in the tech world. It’s seamless and there’s not a lot of bumps. It’s easy to use and it’s intuitive. They think, “They’re speaking my language. They want me to do this, but they already arrived. I’m going to come here. These people already understand the importance of what is important and therefore, I’m intrigued to possibly pick them versus another company trying to woo me.”
You will stand out competitively. If you were that candidate or potential employee, wouldn’t that also mean to you what the experience of working for that company was likely to be like?
I was speaking at a Coca-Cola Summit for CMOs who carry Coke instead of the other brand. One of them was the CMO of Domino’s Pizza and I said to him, “What’s your biggest marketing challenge?” He said, “Attracting tech people.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yes. We’re competing against a lot of other tech companies because we’re promoting this app that tracks your pizza from the time you ordered it online, how fast it’s getting there and who’s doing it. We used to say we’re a pizza company that uses tech to try to attract this top tech talent. Now we say we’re an eCommerce company that happens to sell pizza.” I thought, “You’re speaking their language because eCommerce company happens to sell insert books. It sounds a lot like Amazon, but you’re just inserting pizza.” That’s another example of what you’re talking about speaking the right lingo to recruit the right people.
I’m working with a company that layout offices. They get the furniture and they design it. It’s an integrated system that they offer and they’re big on what they refer to as resimercial design, which is this blend between residential and commercial design. In redoing their branding where you’re leveraging that as one of the key distinguishable properties that they want to promote to potential customers as to how they can attract their ideal employees. Many companies are having a problem attracting a good workforce. Designing their offices in resimercial styles are attractive to today’s workforce because it’s a cooler atmosphere. I even dig deeper and I was like, “There’s also an added psychological benefit here. In all our lives, the lines are blurred between work and in our personal lives. There are almost no lines.” Therefore, in the workplace when you soften those lines, it’ll feel like that. You increased productivity because it’s not like you’re going to take the hour and go down to the cafeteria. You’re going to sit in a café and keep working while you’re having your sandwich.
At least have a casual conversation with people you work with and collaborate on brainstorming ideas in a new space. I’m a big believer in that as well. Any last thoughts or a quote you want to leave us with?
Philosophically, I believe that businesses, whether they’re businesses seeking their ideal customers or their dream employees, those that take the time to get the audience, get them. They get the audience they want to reach and achieve their goals. Companies that are willing to get their customers will get better customers and companies that are willing to get today’s workforce will get their dream employees. It starts with having a willingness to understand the lingo of the people that you want to attract. I look at lingo as the evolution beyond buyer personas and avatars, which at best scratches the surface. It’s an attempt. Buyer personas and avatars is an attempt to understand that you have to go further than that today because all the companies that are producing buyer personas and avatars are all going to compete with one another. If you want to stand out, go beyond the buyer persona and avatar and find out what emotionally moves the audience that you’re trying to attract.
People can find you if they want to hire you and have a conversation about having you as a speaker at JeffreyShaw.com. Jeffrey, thanks for being such a great guest and sharing your secrets on lingo.
John, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Important Links
- LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible
- Creative Warriors
- JeffreyShaw.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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