One of my earliest jobs was at advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding back in the late 70s. I was a Kelly Girl, a temporary secretarial services worker, brought in to cover a maternity leave. I sat in on meetings as minute-taker, typed volumes of communications that flew between agency employees and clients, ran art boards and interoffice envelopes between departments, fetched supplies and prepared coffee. When the person I was covering for returned, they made room for me at the next desk and kept me on.

It was my first exposure to advertising and to the individual specialties required to create it: Writing, graphic design, photography, film, layout (this was the era of x-acto knives, rubber cement and adhesive wax) and account planning. As I silently transcribed often heated discussions among creative teams and account executives, I discovered the world of designers who reverentially referred to the works of Saul Bass and Massimo Vignelli, copy writers who studied David Ogilvy, Eugene Schwartz and Claude Hopkins, and a building full of people who had read (and re-read) Marshall McLuhan the same way medical students study the Atlas of Human Anatomy and law students study the U.S. constitution.

I arrived at this job already knowing about music and music theory, art history and art theory, and the different styles of writing. I knew that great success in artistic pursuits was almost always preceded by studying masters, learning the rules before one broke them, and practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. What I learned during what turned into working on and off at the agency over the next three years was that advertising is also a profession, and that the most successful practitioners were the ones who treated it as such.

Since that time I have enthusiastically embraced each of the advances that make it easier to execute advertising, from the advent of digital design to the ability to communicate directly with audiences online. And as McLuhan pointed out in 1964 when Arthur C. Clarke was first predicting the internet, the digital age has not only changed how we create advertising, it has also changed what we can create.

But there is another, insidious aspect to this evolution: Digital tools and publishing have also changed who can create.

At this point you may be thinking I’m a bit of a snob, and I’ll own some of that. I appreciate good advertising. I want to see graphics that are not just visually appealing, but which are also clearly designed to achieve a purpose. Grammatically correct isn’t sufficient to be considered good copy. Good copy is compelling and works within the larger design and media to be greater than the sum of its words. A bad photo crop can ruin composition and distract the eye. Professionally produced advertising should make you think. It should stick with you.

This doesn’t mean that one can’t create great advertising without study or experience. Every medium has its savants and prodigies and all of us land on an amazing idea now and then. But savants, prodigies and luck are exceptions, not the norm.

However, the predictable outcome of lots of bad advertising isn't my reason for calling the democratization of design insidious. Bad advertising has always existed. I don’t even say it because bad design leads to waste of advertising dollars (though it does). I say it because producing mediocre advertising has become a distraction for businesses everywhere.

I Can Do it Myself

Most people couldn’t afford a printing press, so developing the knowledge to set up, maintain, and use one didn’t occur to the average person. But Microsoft Word and — worse (much worse) — PowerPoint have made it easy for anyone to assemble pages that look like graphic design. Comfort with those tools led to the confidence to try a variety of digital design tools, including complicated software like Photoshop and Illustrator. Into this opportunity stepped Canva and dozens of software look-alikes; design programs that make it possible for anyone to create advertising.

All these developments are good. Even Canva (and its ilk) have a role to play within professional marketing departments. What’s not good? Business owners spending their precious and limited time creating advertising instead of spending that time doing the strategic and technical work of their businesses: Producing and delivering the products and services they sell.

Before easy-for-anyone-to-use digital design tools, a business owner had no choice but to hire a professional to create their advertising. In most cases the result was a professional advertising message. But even if they lobbed the advertising creation off on the local newspaper or a less-than-effective advertising resource, the resulting advertising still didn’t take up the business owner’s time and distract them from the business at hand.

The “I can do it myself” movement in business advertising isn’t reducing the cost of advertising. It’s reducing the effectiveness of management.

I Can Direct a Team

What about the business owner who has a large enough organization to afford hiring a marketing person? Is that better? Not necessarily.

The person hired is almost always expected to write copy and blog posts, create graphics, manage social media, take photographs, and manage the website. These are all distinctly different skills. Again — not being a snob here. I know many people who do an admirable job of managing all these tasks. But who is developing them? Who is helping them hone their skills as an advertiser and marketer? Because invariably the do-it-all person who assumes this role is not the more senior advertising professional who has been developed over many years by many mentors to understand the theory and practice of each of these specialties. No, it’s the entry level or lower management person who appreciates the flexibility and creativity of the job and is happily making it up as they go.

This scenario is still better than the business owner themself producing the marketing. In this content-driven marketing moment when volumes of creative and writing must be produced just to try to penetrate the noise (even while contributing to it), a do-it-all marketing team member can play an important role.

If the work they produce delivers a measurable positive outcome.

If the do-it-all marketing person is successfully (and measurably) producing new leads and helping to deliver those leads into the hands of salespeople, or guiding those leads down the sales funnel to close sales, or inspiring repurchase behavior and loyalty, then having an in-house advertising department makes sense. But if this person, which often becomes a team, is costing one, two, or more salaries to produce lots of satisfying visuals without leading to increased sales sufficient to pay for their salaries and deliver profit, then the business is simply wasting money.

The problem with the average in-house marketing/advertising/creative effort is that most business owners are not trained marketing or advertising professionals, nor do they hire seasoned marketing or advertising professionals to run the department. The result is too often a cost center that produces volumes of low-yield work.

I Don’t Like It: The Misplaced Insertion of Personal Taste in Advertising

“It’s hideous.” I remember the first time I heard an art director proclaim this, curling his lip at a presentation while simultaneously crushing the soul of the graphic designer presenting it. I didn’t see the problem with the graphic; in fact, it looked pretty good to me. But instead of sending the graphic designer out of his office to wallow in her shame, the art director proceeded to dissect the presentation, explaining why it was off message and how the elements of the presentation failed to deliver the intended result. He made suggestions about elements that would work better. It reminded me of one of my professors dissecting my poetry, explaining why the word choices and cadence might work for other forms of writing, but not for the work at hand.

When an untrained business owner directs, criticizes, corrects, or rejects the advertising efforts of an untrained employee, the only basis they have for argument is personal taste and opinion.

Without technical knowledge about why the color orange might be the correct color for a certain psychological response, why a line wrap might matter (and conversely, when it shouldn’t), when illustration might be a better convention than photography, how an eye moves across a printed page compared to a digital device … without technical knowledge, the decisions will be based on what colors each individual prefers, how certain shapes or graphics affect them personally, and whether or not that person would use a certain word choice in their own speech.

As Christine Catarino, marketing director at E.A. Dion recently said to me in a conversation about this topic, “When people who are not in that world (advertising) put all of their subjective feelings into that world, it becomes really difficult to achieve a great result.”

There should be discussion between the person commissioning the advertising and the professional creating it – lots of it. But the conversation should be anchored by reasons and intention, not taste and opinion.

The past decade has seen a significant in-housing of marketing creative across corporate America. Much of this is driven by the sheer volume of online marketing that must be produced and the commensurate need for speed and flexibility. In 2021, at a time when marketing budgets had plummeted to 6.4% of overall company revenue (down from 11% before the pandemic), a Gartner survey of 400 marketers revealed that 29% of the work that had been previously managed by agencies had been moved in-house since 2020.

But that trend appears to have slowed significantly as corporate managers discover the risks associated with in-housing creative. Chief among those risks is recruiting the right people. Even when a company manages to recruit strong creatives, retention can be difficult given that this workforce typically thrives on new challenges and creative diversity. And there is a bigger, more difficult issue as well: No matter how abrasive the feedback might be, talented creatives would rather take knowledgeable criticism from a skilled art or creative director than from a boss suggesting arbitrary changes based on personal taste and opinion.

So what is the average business-owner to do?

Start by recognizing that the creation of effective advertising requires professional knowledge and experience. A massage therapist can help you address back pain, but if your disc needs repair, you don’t ask the massage therapist to cut you – you go to an orthopedic surgeon. If the orthopedic surgeon recommends something you’re uncomfortable with, you’d be wise to check with a different orthopedic surgeon, rather than arguing for a treatment plan based on your opinion and research you did on Google (though medical specialists will tell you that even this is changing. Apparently now everyone has the same knowledge as their doctors).

You may need an in-house person or team to crank out constant content, but give them access to professional guidance and support. This will make their work product more effective, and it will also help them develop as marketing professionals. Most agencies are accustomed to collaborating with in-house teams, which can keep your agency-associated costs down and can significantly improve marketing employee retention.

Finally, make sure you have access to professional marketing and advertising guidance as well. A true professional will share the reasons and experience behind their suggestions, allowing you to rent years of professional knowledge on very favorable terms rather than having to purchase it … or do without.

If you have ever looked at a couple and wondered what one saw in the other … if you have ever looked at a famous painting and realized that it does nothing for you … if you have ever discussed the likability of cilantro … you know that taste is not universal. Stop basing your advertising creative on taste. Stop thinking the customer sees things the way you see them. Stop believing that opinion is the same as experience. Instead, look for an adviser, agency, or resource that can guide you — or better, your team — to create the kind of advertising that cuts through noise, grabs attention, and inspires response.

Don’t worry. You can still apply your preference for blue to your home décor and you get to choose what to hang on the walls of your office. But when your focus is appropriately placed on how much return your advertising dollars deliver — and not simply on how much you spend or if you personally like it — your bottom line will thank you.

Who hasn’t experienced that moment of dread when we first realize a serious mistake has been made? The initial feeling is great insecurity: How did this happen? What will my boss think of me? How will my peers view me? Will this cause us to lose clients? Market share? Brand value? Could I get demoted? Lose my job? 

What happens next is driven by personality, character, and (hopefully) company culture. Do you immediately raise the alarm, own it, and figure out how to address it? Or do you take the opposite approach and bury or try to obfuscate? If the mistake is being reported to you, do you get angry and place blame? Pile on criticism even as someone tries to be accountable? Or do you go into problem-solving mode with them?

It’s in the what-happens-next that great businesses (and leaders) distinguish themselves from the average and the insufficient. Mistakes provide the ultimate training ground for one of life’s  greatest teachers … process.

The Difference Between Knowing and Understanding

I used to think that having an eidetic memory would be an incredible advantage — that the ability to remember everything I ever read, learned, or experienced would help me to excel. Then I encountered someone who had an eidetic memory, and she helped me change my mind.

First, she pointed out that the downside of remembering everything one ever experienced is at least as great as the upside. Fair. Second, she distinguished between knowing something and being good at something. And she was right. Before I mastered bread-baking I memorized the ingredients and instructions, but I had to experience the process multiple times before I could make a loaf worth eating. Before I had the opportunity to lead large numbers of people I studied leadership, motivation, and management. But I had to apply all that knowledge to real life and make real mistakes to develop leadership skill. 

The person with the eidetic memory was clear about the limitations of her gift. She was able to recall volumes of content with remarkable precision, but the knowledge ended there, because she lacked the experience to apply and connect much of it. In her words, she was “like a librarian, only faster, because I don’t need to consult the card catalog.”

Process Matters More than Results

It is through this lens that we can best understand that the purpose of business is not end results, but process. 

I can feel the feathers ruffling from here as everyone who has ever created a quarterly shareholder report, attended a management meeting or been the evalu-ee in an annual employee review shakes their heads, clenches their fists, and gasps aloud at how any serious business practitioner could fail to grasp the all-consuming requirement of RESULTS. 

I would like you to pat down those feathers, take a cool sip of water and consider how fixation on results over process ultimately leads to lack of innovation, the failure of employees to thrive, loss of competitiveness and even erosion of ethics.

Four Ways that Process Drives Excellence

Perhaps 90% of what happens in a business is repetitive process. From accounting to customer support to product development to marketing, each functional area of any business involves countless processes done by a sometimes stable, sometimes changing group of people. Admonishments to deliver “great customer service” will rarely yield the results you desire, but focus on improving the processes by which you deliver customer service can lead to greatness.

Process Documentation Improves Performance

One of my great frustrations as a business owner is how I often end up doing things myself because it’s faster than handing off the task. But peek behind the curtain of that frustration, and the problem is me. Many of the tasks I do are largely intuitive, based on decades of experience and muscle memory. But this doesn’t make the way I am doing them the most efficient nor even the most effective. 

When you stop and think through a process sufficiently to write it down so someone else can do it, you invariably improve the process. You will find gaps in the process that could lead to error. You will uncover assumptions that are no longer (or perhaps never were) relevant. You can visualize where you are taking three steps when one would be sufficient. When process documentation is done as a group, you discover how many different ways people are doing a process. As the group streamlines the process and learns from each other, the resulting process conformity decreases errors.  The act of documenting a process leads to greater efficiency and quality.

Process Uniformity Ensures that Improvements Reach Everyone in the Organization

When the organization achieves process uniformity, the first and obvious benefits are that errors go down, quality goes up, and efficiency improves. Those would be reason enough to embrace the value of processes. But there is still more benefit to be had.

The way you maintain process uniformity is to insist that process change is always an option, but that process change itself is a process. In every organization there are always a few people that perform head-and-shoulders above the others. Some of this will be due to innate talent and drive. But some of it will be that those people are improving the way they do their processes - improvements the rest of the company does not know about.

If your process change practice requires that anyone who has an idea for improving a process must bring that improvement to the group for discussion, testing, and agreement, then two things will happen: 1) genuine improvements will make it to the rest of the organization, and 2) ideas that are not actually improvements will not make it into the live environment.

Process Review Tied to Goals Leads to Success

When working with companies to set metrics for profit growth and quality improvement, one of the performance drivers is always related to process improvement. How does this look?  Here are a few examples:

Goal Example 1: Increase Overall Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

• Metrics of success (RESULTS!) will generally be quantitative, like respond to emails 10% faster or reduce returns related to shipping errors by 15%. 
• Most teams, without proper guidance, will simply try to work harder and/or faster to achieve those goals.
• But the way to achieve quantitative goals is to engage in qualitative behavior, like understanding all the underlying causes of shipping errors or understanding the methods of distributing and responding to customer emails. In other words, process analysis and improvement.

Goal Example 2: Improve Return on Product Development Investment

• Metrics of success could include $XXXX sales or 16% sales growth from new products or 11% new customer acquisition through new products.
• The best way to achieve those results is through analyzing your new product decision-making processes, product development process, and communication processes and dynamics between product development, sales, and marketing.

If you start with the assumption that any process can be improved, and you proactively review the processes underlying every business goal, your ability to deliver the desired results will improve. After all, result metrics are simply the what. Process improvement is the how. 

Process Can Transform Problems Into Opportunities

But what about all the things that happen in a business that aren’t repetitive processes … the mistakes and the anomalies?

As I mentioned earlier, once the mistake has been discovered, what happens next could easily come down to differences in character and responsibility. But your business can’t afford that. You need problems to be effectively addressed as quickly as they are discovered. 

The first step is to have a process for addressing mistakes. 

Simply having a process for solving problems is an important nod to the reality that mistakes will happen. Companies that acknowledge that mistakes will happen and create methods for addressing them eliminate some of the defensive behavior that can make problems worse. More importantly, you can create a culture that responds with creativity rather than punitorily to mistakes, and this is where the magic happens.

Most mistakes are honest mistakes. In an environment where process is respected and processes are well-documented and trained, mistakes are generally the result of changing conditions in the market, new technologies, new business expectations, or evolution of the business model. It is impossible to anticipate all the ways that internal and external change might lead to mistakes (though it’s important to try). For those things we don’t anticipate, mistakes become our professor.

When a team engages in the problem-solving process, they go from knowing something to understanding something. Without the problem-solving process, they may only know the most superficial aspect of the problem, such as “Mark screwed up,” or they may even know that “Mark didn’t realize that Erin recorded the changes in inventory values incorrectly, and as a result we owe a lot of back taxes.”

Moving beyond knowing to understanding requires figuring out why Mark didn’t realize that Erin recorded the changes in inventory values incorrectly. A well-defined problem-solving process will help you define the problem, determine the cause of the problem, explore any other variables that could also lead to the problem, and create a solution that not only addresses the current problem but also prevents it from happening in the future. This will make your company more efficient and resilient. 

It can also lead to consistent, even transformative, innovation.

This aspect of process management is incredibly exciting. Ask a group of people in a room to come up with a new idea, and watch the human embodiment of writer’s block unfold before your eyes. After uncomfortable silence, the ideas will either be based on things other companies are doing already or so far out there that you need a rocket to reach them. 

Outside of silver bullets (which are widely published but rarely occur), most transformative innovation comes as a result of evaluating how something is done so observantly and so often that you are able to identify new opportunities that you couldn’t see or which were not possible before.

Commitment to continuously improving the processes of the business IS a commitment to results, but it brings with it the possibility of evolution and innovation. More importantly, you begin to see the truth of business results: Namely, that a result is simply a lagging indicator, but process is what drives the entire organization forward.

One of the challenges with relying on email marketing is that so many people hate receiving email. When you consider just how much SPAM is flying around these days, it’s not hard to understand why. Most of us work hard to keep our email communications interesting and relevant, and we watch our mail frequency. But even the most careful email senders ran into difficulty sending email during the months of October – December, 2021.

This is because the email services have implemented “rate limiting policies.” You can expect email delivery and open rates to go down and bounce rates to go up. Here’s what we know so far:

The Big 5 Are All Experimenting with Rate Limiting

• Yahoo
• AOL
• Google
• Microsoft
• Apple

They have decided to email rate limit all mass marketing emails from ANY large sender of mass emails:

• Constant Contact
• Active Campaign
• Keap/Infusionsoft
• Salesforce
• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo
• Etc.

Why Are They Rate Limiting?

They want to reduce and prevent spam and mass-marketing emails coming into their systems. Email limiting used to be based on blacklists, wherein a domain could be blacklisted for sending too much unsolicited or SPAM email. The new rate-limiting policies are not based on blacklists. Instead, this was a decision made by the Big 5 companies themselves. It’s not just bad actors being limited anymore.

Yahoo was the first to implement rate limiting. You may remember, if you sent an email in the early autumn of 2021 and suddenly saw a bounce rate of 31% or higher. Yahoo was pleased with the massive reduction in mass-marketing and spam emails, and now the other companies are copying their rate limiting policy. As of the end of December, bounce rates were generally down to the 13% range, but that’s still very high compared with the 2% - 5% bounce rates that were the norm before these new policies were implemented.

So How Many Email Can You Send?

Single emails will almost certainly be allowed through without rate limiting. But any email broadcast is at risk. It all depends on the receiving policies that are set, and so far at least, the Big 5 aren’t publishing those policies.

If you’re a WerxMarketing customer, you’ve already been transitioning to more and more drip-style email, and that’s a good thing. Using marketing automation to send targeted messages to specific customers enjoys higher response rates overall, and will not trigger the email system receiving policies the same way that broadcasts do.

Broadcast Time Spread

Yahoo has shared some details of their rate-limiting policy. At Yahoo, mass-marketing emails sent from from one account (Constant Contact or Keap for example) for your domain (yourdomain.com) are watched for over a 12 hour period by Yahoo. If you send two broadcasts within 12 hours, they will be counted cumulatively, and will be rate-limited. The watch time frames for other email services are still unknown.

How This Affects Your Marketing

Depending on the policy of each company, this could mean significant delay in the delivery of your email, or even non-delivery in some cases.

Here’s how we think it will work (“think,” because nobody is sharing their policy. This is based on monitoring email sends and what little information we can glean through online research). It appears that a high percentage of emails sent through broadcasts will be “soft bounced,” which means they aren’t turned off for future email campaigns in your marketing system, but that they will not receive the email for that particular broadcast.

It’s also possible that an entire broadcast could be blocked by the receiving mail server. In that case, the receiving mail server may request the sending mail server to send the (broadcast) emails again. This would likely be handled entirely at the server level, and could lead to delays in your email delivery. In these cases, the email services are interested in determining if the sending mail server was a mass spam source, and the assumption is that if it is, they most likely will not try sending again. On the other hand, a legitimate mail server will try sending again (up to a certain number of times / over a certain time period). So on the second send attempt the email may get through. Getting through still doesn’t mean the email won’t be classified as junk/bulk but at least the client will receive the email somewhere.

As mentioned above, so far only Yahoo has been willing to communicate with the marketing services about what is going on and why. Apple has always had a strict delivery limitation on mass emails, so we may not notice much change to Apple recipients. Microsoft is currently implementing the rate limiting in a light way but will almost certainly implement more fully soon based on what we’ve learned from people in conversation with them. Google also appears to be implementing a similar rate limiting policy, which is consistent with their overall migration toward more privacy and less spam in general on the internet.

What Can You Do?

Here are a few ideas that may work, based on the limited information we have so far.

1. Strongly encourage all your email recipients to whitelist your domain. There’s no guarantee that this will help, but it certainly can’t hurt.
2. Look into making your email more constant, less broadcast-y, by using drip and automation techniques. This has other marketing benefits as well, but it does require campaign planning and list clean-up and management to implement.
3. You could try timing broadcasts to be sent 12-24 hours ahead of when they will need to be received. If you’re good about sending messages to be delivered during the “most likely to be opened window,” this will feel like a step backward. But getting delivered at a less-than-optimal time is better than not getting delivered at all (or late).
4. Review your data to see how much delivery delay is made by each of the Big 5 providers to figure out the lead times needed for broadcasts. Ask for feedback from cooperative customers with some test sends. Though it is somewhat maddening, some deliveries will go through without rate limiting and some will be rate limited and there’s no way to anticipate or know which condition you are sending email into.
5. Final sale, webinar reminders, and other timely messages may not be effective. This is another area to test and monitor. Consider using text messaging for time-sensitive messaging. Or consider having an alternate service just to send time-sensitive emails.
6. Ask your domain/IT support to increase the strictness of our domain DNS SPF record. Most SPF records are set to “loose” by default. Apple apparently likes to see strict settings on domain email related records, when considering whether to deliver emails or not.
7. Ask your marketing service (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Keap, etc.) about their list and email collection policies. If your emails are sent by a service that mass distributes emails a lot of SPAM email due to loose policies, rate limiting policies that punish your marketing service will hurt you too, no matter how careful you are with your lists.

This isn’t the best news. 2021 saw an increase in the cost of reaching customers through advertising, and now email efficacy is going down. But this is the nature of digital marketing. The various service providers and technologies keep evolving, and we must stay on top of the changes and make smart evolutionary changes of our own.

The good news is that customers are happier when they receive less SPAM, and they’re happiest when they receive email that is interesting, relevant, warm, witty, and feels very personal. If you work toward delivering on those characteristics, you’re likely to stay out of the rate-limiting filters too. So let’s focus on doing better marketing, and everybody wins.

“Being able to do something online that you can’t do in any other way is important. It’s all about the fundamental tenet of building any business, which is creating a value proposition for the customer, and online . . . That’s because the web is a pain to use today! We’ve all experienced the modem hangups and the browsers crash — there are all sorts of inconveniences: websites are slow, modem speeds are slow. So if you’re going to get people to use a website in today’s environment, you have to offer them overwhelming compensation for this primitive infant technology. And I would claim that that compensation must be so strong that it’s basically the same as saying, you can only do things online today that simply can’t be done any other way.”  Jeff Bezos

Website Innovation Goes Beyond the Technology

This quote is from an interview Jeff Bezos did in 1998. I remember reading it at the time and trying to wrap my mind around how I could take advantage of the internet in the business I was then running. It seemed clear to me in 1998 that even though we could use the internet to take orders and ship goods (the business was a jewelry industry distributor), using the internet as a simple replacement for phone or fax orders was not going to take sufficient advantage of the emerging technology. Back then, we didn’t even have the computer systems necessary to facilitate significant use of the internet. We didn’t have fast bandwidth to the building. We didn’t have employees who could type fast enough (or in some cases spell well enough) to manage online orders in the absolutely superb way they handled phone orders. We needed all the building blocks and had to build them fast.

Take away the modems and terribly slow internet speeds of 1998, and what Jeff Bezos said is still completely true today. “The compensation (for using a website) has to be so strong that it’s basically the same as saying you can only do things online today that simply can’t be done any other way.”

Unfortunately, another thing is still true. Most businesses have still not done a good job of putting all the building blocks in place to provide a meaningful, differentiated, online experience. That’s what website innovation is all about.

In 1964, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” Back then, he was focused on the communication medium of television, and how television was changing not only the way households received information, but the culture itself. But he could have easily been speaking about every communication revolution since then: cable tv, digital distribution of music, video games, then online games, social media, the internet. Each new form of communication brought with it new opportunities for communication, new ways of achieving objectives, and new cultural implications.

Business websites are a communication medium. To date, most business owners have attended to only the most superficial aspects of offering a website.

• The standard page format of websites has barely changed since 1999: Home, About, Services, Contact, Shop. . . maybe News.
• Many retail websites feature pictures and in-store videos to show the website visitor what it would look like if they paid a physical visit. Some go so far as to spend tens of thousands of dollars producing virtual tours, à la real estate agent home videos.
• Product selection on retail websites is often limited to images and iframes provided by their suppliers or which come as part of the industry platform they joined.
• B2B websites are even further behind, failing to put full product offerings online or offer the specific services (and price levels) their customers expect to access when meeting up at a trade show or picking up the phone.

Website visitors do not expect the website to replicate your store, are not motivated by seeing all the same products on your website that they find on every other website, and they certainly do not want to purchase your building.

In fact, most of the work of creating an effective business website isn’t about building the website at all. Effective websites are borne out of the work that comes before they are built.

Business as we know it has changed forever. Online shopping and buying trends that were happening prior to the pandemic have been dramatically accelerated – economists and social scientists have estimated that we experienced five years of technological evolution in the eight-month period of March - October of 2020. When physical restrictions are lifted, we will not go back to the old ways of working, shopping, buying, interacting with brands, collaborating with known suppliers, or finding new suppliers.

In many ways, this is excellent news. By 2019, most businesses had become mired in price competition, focusing tremendous corporate energy on driving prices down to satisfy price focused B2B and B2C customers. Chasing prices is a zero-sum game, forcing companies into offshoring more work, laying off more employees, piling more work on the employees they have left, and ultimately, reducing quality.

Price sensitivity is not going to go away, but there is another truth here to which most business owners have paid insufficient attention: You don’t need all the customers. You just need the right customers. Your value offering can be . . . must be . . . about more than price. And your website, which will remain a central part of your communications strategy from this point forward, must communicate your value offering in more than just words. Your website must communicate your value offering in benefits and functionality.

The Cost of Pricing

When does price matter most? Two scenarios come to mind:

• Price matters when selling essential items like food and clothing to low-income consumers.
• Price matters when there is no other point of differentiation between products.

If you are a grocer in a food desert, God bless you and this article probably is not for you. For everyone else, if you are feeling the squeeze of price competition, it is probably because you have not done enough work to differentiate your business from your competitors. Sure, there will always be customers (or potential customers) who complain your price is too high. But if you peer beneath the surface, you will quickly realize that those customers are not your ideal customers, your target customers.

Doing the Work of Website Innovation

The first part of this work is the work of defining your strategy. If you cannot articulate who you are, what you do that makes you different, and why you matter to your target customer, then you must start there. It is a big topic, but for a quick overview of what’s involved, here is a 17-minute podcast and transcript.

How you apply your business strategy to website innovation should ultimately be as unique as your strategy itself. Let’s look at a few examples to illustrate the potential.

An Online Retailer’s Website Innovation

This example involves a jewelry designer who sells both to boutiques and direct online. Her product is fine jewelry, so expensive. She produces two collections for boutique distribution, for which she maintains small inventories and maintains the capability to produce reorders quickly. For consumer direct sales she only sells one-of-a-kind and custom. A big part of her brand value is her aesthetic – people come to her for her design. But her customers stay because of her commitment to developing and nurturing relationships, and her uncanny ability to realize in physical jewelry form an idea the customer could not articulate but which was clear in her own mind. Finally, this designer has the exquisite ability to help a customer give herself permission to spend money on herself.

A Shopify style, put-a-product-in-the-cart-and-ship-it website will never be able to deliver on this value proposition.

For selling, her website needed both a consumer front end and a B2B back end.

One-of-a-kind products that are ready to ship can be ordered as is or can be adjusted according to the client’s wishes. From within those product listings, it is easy to book a quick video chat or send an email or text message.

The collections available only through boutiques are also available for browsing, with fast references to the retailers that carry them. She uses these pages to explain why she separates products available directly through the site versus products available at retail, and why she thinks it is important to protect business for her select boutiques. This transparency builds trust and respect for her business principles.

All her product pages are scattered with links to articles with images and commentary about what she is creating and why. This invites her website visitors into her design process in a way that is unique to an online experience. If a customer visits the physical shop, she will experience the design process in a way that is intimately about herself. Visitors to the website can experience the design process in a way that is more intimately about the designer. Both can be excellent experiences, and each is designed to work most effectively relative to the benefits and drawbacks of its respective channel.

The site pays extensive attention to the experience of creating custom design, with obvious and easy options to launch or schedule a phone or video call on each relevant page. She toyed initially with trying to figure out how to create a “ring builder,” a website convention showing all the possible components and iterations of a design. But she ultimately decided against it, because dragging a graphic around to make a new graphic could not possibly replicate the experience of letting a talented designer guide one through the creative process.

B2B clients can log in to a secure back end, where they can shop all the products available to them for stock, in their own negotiated prices. They can place a purchase order or credit card order immediately, or schedule or launch a video or phone call to speak with the designer. B2B clients can also see past orders, track order progress, and see shipping details.

This website does not require expensive software or management. Superficially it may even seem like a lot of other websites. But by approaching her website through the lens of her strategy and value offering, this designer went beyond setting up a website and deep into website innovation.

Website Innovation for B2B

Let’s look at the website of a company that distributes instrument and music supplies to music stores and schools. They manufacture some of their supplies at their northern European production facility and distribute thousands of supplies from other manufacturers. Not only are they faced with a shrinking market, but their suppliers can also take advantage of the same internet technology to cut them out as the middleman.

To stop just trying to keep their business alive and actually start growing it again, they did a strategic overhaul in the years before Covid-19 came calling. During that process, they remembered that their deep knowledge in all things music supplies was just as important as the products they sold. They decided to stop worrying about how much cheaper their clients could find things on Amazon, eBay, CDiscount, and Otto, and instead focus on how much their customers trusted them to not only sell the best products, but to help them select the right products.

They knew all their products had to be available for shopping and comparison, and that their business systems had to be upgraded to support that. Their systems overhaul made it possible to maintain all their products in only one system and have all those products sellable both through their traditional office support and on the website without doing any extra administration. The systems update also made it possible to show each customer their negotiated prices automatically and made it easy for customers to check on order history and statuses.

Implementing an Inventory Control System

But the big work of website innovation involved answering these questions:

• What are the things we do really well – the things that gained us trust and respect from our customers – now?
• When we update our website, how might a website underperform on those important offerings because a website is different than a phone call or a meeting?
• What can our website do to promote those things, perhaps in ways that a phone call or meeting could not do?

The answers to these questions clarified that their website needed to provide all the information, training, recommendations, and knowledge that their customer service team had been providing all along. The answer was to create an information architecture using tagging and categories to make it easy and intuitive for customers to learn about any product, find other products like it, compare products, and do deep-dives into product features, functions, and benefits.

Because so many of their clients are music teachers, they had an extensive form library that they had historically used to assist teachers with budget requests. They turned these forms into an on-demand, easy-to-use, interactive, complete-and-download system. They also set up the system so a teacher could produce a pro forma order and download a quote for administrative review. They are currently in the process of refining that system so they can more closely collaborate with individual schools relative to budgets for music supplies.

The website also makes it easy to jump on a phone or video consult, which blurs the line between online and in-real-life interactions, builds trust, and increases close rates. For this company, website innovation was about making sure the online experience was the best possible experience of their company by mitigating the downsides of the channel and playing up its potential.

What Will Your Website Innovation Involve?

You, too, can use your website as a strategic extension of your brand value. Customers are not looking for thousands of products on one site, without curation or context. Sure, they want to be able to buy things, but it is easier than ever to find things and buy them. In fact, consumers are currently overwhelmed by choice, much of it meaningless. 

No, if you want to stand out online, you must identify your target audience and do the brand-relevant things that matter to them (or that will appeal to the right subset of new visitors). The technology is available, and it is affordable. What is generally missing is thoughtful analysis, planning, and imagination. Once you do that work, new answers will occur to you that simply had not occurred before.

So stop. Before you jump into Wix (or Weebly, or Square, or Shopify) and start dragging and dropping your way to a same-as-everyone-else website, do the work. The thinking work of website innovation.

So you've done the work of coming up with a business strategy, a minimum viable product or service, and a business plan. Now what? Well, for a company to achieve its strategy and operate effectively, it must have goals, measurable objectives, and a method of monitoring and managing results; in other words, a Management Framework.  Management Frameworks are the tools used by the most competitive companies to turbo-charge innovation, harness energy, and align people, teams, and divisions. Without a management framework, companies function at a tactical level at best.

There is no perfect management framework, but there are several excellent ones. It’s important to understand how each system works, and which framework to apply to specific companies, cultures, or situations. Some of these systems also work well in tandem, offsetting each other’s weaknesses with complementary strengths.

The two most frequently used systems for performance measurement are SMART goals and KPIs. Unfortunately, these are the two weakest measurement approaches, best used as the tactical component of a more holistic strategic framework.

The two most used management frameworks are Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Objectives & Key Results (OKR). Two other frameworks, 4DX and EFQM, should also be considered when determining which management framework to adopt.

Let’s start with a comparison table, then look at the basics of each metric system and management framework.

Read on for an high-level overview of each of these systems.

KPI

Of all the metrics strategies, KPI is the narrowest. KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, which can be any performance metric for any business outcome or activity. A KPI can be a Lag indicator, a Lead indicator, or a Tactical measure. It can measure success, output, quantity, quality, or time.

KPIs are most effective when used within a management framework, such as Balanced Scorecard, OKR, EFQM, or 4DX. On their own, KPIs can be useful, but they can also be suboptimizing and drive conflicting focus between teams and departments.

SMART Goals

Like KPIs, SMART Goals are a measurement type, not a management framework. Smart Goals are a popular goal-setting technique that focus on creating effective goals. There are no mechanisms within SMART Goals to drive alignment within an organization, and no guarantee that any goal set will lead to innovation. SMART goals are a criteria, not a framework or system.

SMART Goals can be Lag or Lead indicators, and can be created at any level of an organization.

Within the SMART criteria, there are five things that a goal must be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

4DX

Created by Stephen Covey and Chris McChesney, this is system is a hybrid - part measurement method, part management framework. It is designed to create:

• Focus
• Leverage
• Engagement
• Accountability

This system proposes to help managers and employees cut through the constant flurry of tasks and shifting priorities and focus on the key goals for each area. Key concepts of this system:

• The more goals a person has to achieve, the less likely they are to focus enough to achieve any of them effectively.
• Competing priorities and goals suboptimize the organization.
• Everyone should be working on two big goals (called WIGs, or Wildly Important Goals in 4DX) at any time.

Rules of this system include:

• No team can focus on more than two WIGs at the same time.
• The battles you choose must win the war (strategic alignment).
• Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate, goals (bottom-up goal development).
• All WIGs must have date gates, in the form of “X to Y by Date” to provide clear scope.

OKR

The first of our three main management frameworks, OKR stands for Objective & Key Results. The OKR and Balanced Scorecard systems share a lot of similarity, and the choice between them often comes down to pace and agility (they can also be used together to gain the greatest benefits of both systems).

Objectives in OKR

According to the OKR definition, an OKR consists of 1–5 Objectives which, by their nature, are qualitative concepts (characterized by their quality and difficult to measure). They provide direction, typically posed in question form:

• What do I want to accomplish?
• Where do I want to go?

The purpose of objectives is to provide the definition for the goal(s) you want to pursue.

The characteristics of OKRs should be:

• Directed
• Aligned
• High in impact power
• Easy to understand
• A means of inspiration

Key Results in OKR

Each of the 1–5 Objectives should have from 3 to 5 Key Results (these need to be quantitative concepts and must be measurable). If it’s not measurable, it’s not a key result.

The purpose of Key Results is to define the measurements that will determine if the organization (team, individual) is progressing toward the objective. Key results are milestones, and answer the questions:

• How will we know when we get there?
• How will we accomplish that?

Key Results should be:

• Easily measurable
• Specific
• Bound to a specific time frame

Initiatives in OKR

Each of the 3 to 5 Key Results may also be linked to specific initiatives meant to define the work needed to maintain progress on the Key Results. They are specific actions and activities designed to deliver the Key Results. There is a minimum of 1 Initiative related to a specific OKR.

Initiatives answer the question:

• What must we do in order to get there?

Initiatives should be:

• Easily measurable
• Specific
• Controllable
• Bound to a specific time frame

Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard is a management framework developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. It is a strategic method designed to align all areas of an organization with corporate strategy, and to drive awareness of what a business must do for customers, excel at internally, and invest and develop in order to achieve its strategic goals.

It is the strongest framework for eliminating competing goals, mitigating suboptimization between departments or functions, and ensuring holistic business goal-setting. It is also one of the best frameworks for driving innovation, due to the unique framework of the Four Perspectives.

Four Perspectives Framework

The framework of the Balanced Scorecard is built on four perspectives:

• Financial Perspective: What must we do for our stakeholders in order to be successful? These are Lag measures.
• Customer Perspective: What must we do for our customers, in order to achieve our financial goals? These are generally Lag measures.
• Internal Perspective: What must we excel at, internally, in order to achieve our customer goals? These are typically Lead measures.
• Learning & Development Perspective: What must we learn, invest in, develop, or acquire in order to achieve our Internal goals? These are typically Lead measures.

Balanced Scorecard implementations are often complex, but it can be implemented in a very lean manner. If complexity is the one reason you’re concerned about using a Balanced Scorecard in your business, dig a little deeper. Small businesses can implement Balanced Scorecards successfully using a lean approach (I call it a “Skinny Scorecard”). One of the best ways to reduce the complexity of the Balanced Scorecard is to combine it with an OKR approach, which keeps the richness of the Balanced Scorecard perspectives while benefitting from the agility of the OKR method.

EFQM

Of all the management frameworks, EFQM is the broadest. EFQM was founded by a consortium of European business leaders, with a goal of creating a formalized management framework to help organizations become more effective and therefore drive overall effectiveness of the European economy. As a result, this framework has a strong social component. The idea is that using the EQFM Excellence Model helps organizations understand where they are on a “path to excellence,” while giving them tools and techniques to measure improvement over time.

EFQM is a framework, with the requisite cause-and-effect elements. In this model, there are “enablers” and “results.” It is sometimes thought that Enablers are similar to Lead measures, and Results are similar to Lag measures, but the model is a bit more nuanced than that.

Here is how the model is most often illustrated:

EFQM Concepts

Enablers include:

• Leadership
• People
• Strategy
• Partnerships and Resources
• Processes, Products, and Services

The idea is that by changing what any of these enablers do, you can change the results of the organization.

Results are the goal, with specific principles in mind:

• People Results
  • Principle: Leading to inspiration and integrity
  • Principle: Succeeding through the talent of people
• Customer Results
  • Principle: Adding value for customers
• Society Results
  • Principle: Creating a sustainable future
• Business Results
  • Principle: Developing organizational capability
  • Principle: Harnessing creativity and innovation
  • Principle: Managing with agility
• Overarching principle: Sustaining outstanding results

Managing Results

EFQM’s RADAR approach is similar to Balanced Scorecard and OKR in so far as it requires the planning and development of “approaches” to describe how each “result” will be achieved. Once you know what the approach will be for each goal, there is a “deployment” step that determines how, where, and when each approach will be implemented. The “Assess and Refine” element of RADAR ensures that progress is continuously monitored, learnings are captured, and the group comes to consensus on whether or not the “approach” to the “result” is working. If it is not, it is refined.

Summary

Like shoes and swimming suits, there's no such thing as a Management Framework that fits everyone perfectly. It's valuable to select the framework that fits your organizational culture, business proposition, and strategy. However, if you're choosing between spending a year to get to the right framework, or spending the year with a management framework that's not perfect, I'd definitely choose the latter. Your management framework is one of the building blocks of business success. No business is too small to have one, and no small business can become a larger, more profitable business without one.

One of the biggest changes of the internet age is hardly ever mentioned: people without formal training in graphic design produce a huge percentage of all the visuals we see today. That's not necessarily a good thing. 

It started when computerized design became accessible in the mid '90s. Soon, everyone who could figure out the software started calling themselves graphic designers. But one can know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator without any understanding of the principles of good design. The situation became more dire in the mid '00s, when tools like Visme, Stencil, Canva, and Crello became available. Don't get me wrong — there's nothing wrong with those tools  At my company, we subscribe to the Adobe suite for all marketing staff - but we also use Visme. Cloud-based design tools are a great way to quickly create graphics, and if you use the templates, you also have some built-in guidelines for good design.

Just last week I was helping a client interview for a new marketing staff position, and the fellow we were interviewing was presenting himself as a graphic designer. So we asked about his training, since his degree was in computer science. There are lots of great graphic design certificate and online programs that he could have attended, or he could have trained at the side of a skilled graphic designer. But he didn't have any graphic design training. What he was basing his skills claim on was deep knowledge of Illustrator and Indesign, and the fact that he makes websites. So, we looked at some of his sites together, and while they were functional, they didn't demonstrate knowledge of visual design principles. He wasn't even aware that such a thing as graphic design principles exists.

Becoming a skilled graphic designer takes a solid education and years of practice - ideally working with mentors who are skilled themselves. And working with an accomplished graphic designer is a true delight. The best of them are visual problem solvers, capable of taking the words and intention of a message and turning it into rich expression.

But if you don't have a graphic designer on staff, or the budget to work with a professional — or maybe you do, but you still need to create a lot of additional graphics for demanding social media channels — then you need a basic understanding of the principles of graphic design. Even if you don't do any of your own graphics, understanding these principles will make you a better collaborator with your professional designer. So here you go: 36 minutes of graphic design principles, for a topic that merits months of study and a lifetime of practice. 

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 Transcript

As more and more business owners create their own advertising using tools like Canva and Visme, it’s become clear that most people do not understand the components of a good advertising layout.  Though the internet and digital advertising are relatively new, and rules have been adapted to accommodate new media, the principles of good design remain consistent, and have been studied and refined over nearly 100 years of practice. Color theory, the use of shapes, eye-path (sometimes referred to as “movement,”), and composition are all elements you must understand to make your ads effective. There is a huge difference between putting information on a page and creating information that is visually appealing AND effective.

Let’s start by defining design. 

When we design something, we are creating it for a particular purpose or effect. If you design kitchen utensils, you are concerned about form – how does it look, how will it look in a certain type of décor – and function – how does it work, how well does it do the task for which it is intended?

When you design a room, both form (how does it look, how does one move through it) and function (does it serve the purpose for which it is intended) matter.

And when you design jewelry, you are expressing those same ideas – form and function - in a wearable medium.

This idea of designing for a purpose – of requiring that you meet both form and function – is the main thing that separates design from art. Art can disregard function, can turn function into farce, or can be entirely without function. Art is all about form. Design must include function.

The main purpose of graphic design is communication.  Communication. The essence of good graphic design is that it uses both form and function to bring someone to understanding something they did not understand before, or to be interested in something in which they were not interested before.

The fundamental purpose of graphic design is to make something easy to use or easy to understand.  Yes, we can do that with words, but when we take those words and make them into visual images, they can be so much more powerful, not to mention accessible.

Some graphical elements are obvious without previous exposure. For instance, CLICK the handwashing sign and the wheelchair access sign are clear without any further explanation. Other signs, CLICK like this Bouy sign, need some imprinting. If you’ve spent much time around water, you’ve probably seen it and know what it is.

In fact, one of the earliest forms of modern graphic design was signs. Signs are a form of universal language.

Most of the discipline of graphic design is wrapped up in the elements of visual hierarchy,  because visual hierarchy plays a primary role in planning the structure of any ad (or environment, like a website) you create. Good visual hierarchies guide the viewers through the information you want them to see in the order you want them to see it. Good visual hierarchies ensure that if a viewer only retains a small percent of the ad, the part they remember is the part that is most important to you as the advertiser.

The best article – and related infographic - I have ever seen on the 12 principles of visual hierarchy was done on the design software Visme’s blog, written by a graphic designer named Samantha Lile. I share some of their content here, but you really need to read the full article and save the infographic for yourself. The link is on your slide.

The first rule in visual hierarchy for graphic design is that size – and more importantly, RELATIVE size, is the fastest, most effective way to emphasize visual elements.  Sizes determine the order that the human eye follows in an ad. It helps the viewer to recognize some things faster than others, and to retain some information better than others.

Here are two more excellent examples of how to use size in creating visual hierarchy. On the left, you see an advertisement for Bentley. If this had been a consumer ad for cars, there’s no way the car would have been so tiny and the word “next” so large. But the intended target for this ad was people interested in the research & development and production capabilities of Bentley. The ad was perfectly structured to put the attention on the right element – the innovation and forward-thinking behind Bentley automotive. In the second example, the use of size perspective helped drive the message home that no trash – even small, biodegradable items – is “small” trash (no hay basura pequeña).  The lime image is also a great example of the use of perspective, which is our next visual hierarchy example.

AS they point out in the Visme blog, the use of perspective creates an illusion of depth. Just as a visual element, that’s interesting. But depth is more important than simply creating visual interest. We can also use the sense of depth in an ad to make ads more relatable to the viewer. Depth can change the feeling of an ad by making it more dimensional. Images that are more dimensional are more visually interesting and more memorable – and we want ads to be both. Also, as in the lime ad in the previous slide, perspective can take something that would have been an afterthought in a more typical image, and turn it into the main point.

This is a brilliant example of perspective (also from the Visme blog). Most shoe ads focus on images of the shoes (from the top, naturally), or of people running in shoes. Pirelli used perspective to make the walking the focus of the ad. The ad instantly makes you wonder how the shoes feel as they hit the ground. It makes you wonder what type of ground the shoes are hitting. It does more to put you IN the Pirelli shoes than any shoe commercial I’ve ever seen. Perspective can make you FEEL the product, and that’s why it’s important in visual hierarchy.

The next visual hierarchy example in the Visme blog is about color and contrast.  It doesn’t take much explanation to understand that using contrast and color make focal content pop out. But we use color and contrast for more than providing direction and readability. The use of high contrast also ads in RETENTION of information, and retention is a precious commodity in a world where the average viewer sees 5,000 ads per day.

We are all aware that colors have psychological import - though be cautious about your color interpretations – they are not uniform across cultures.  The interpretations shown here represent the primary western interpretations. So thinking through

Of course, color goes far beyond the basic Hue, which is where each color sits on the color wheel. Hue refers to the origin of the colors we can see. Primary and secondary colors – yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, and green are hues, as are the tertiary colors – which are mixed colors where neither color is dominant.

But each color also has a broad range of moods which can be expressed through different levels of saturation and value.

Saturation defines the brilliance and intensity of a color. As saturation increases, the colors appear to be more pure. When you lower the saturation of a color, it becomes progressively more gray.

Value has to do with how light or dark a color is. You can add black to a color to shade it darker, or you can add white to a color to tint it lighter.

Understanding color, and specifically, how most people interpret color, is very important for anyone who plans to communicate a message using graphics – a message they want the target to visually and mentally engage with, and once engaged, to understand the way you meant them to understand it.

As you’ve already seen, fonts can be used as part of size and perspective in visual hierarchies, but they also matter on their own. Each font is itself a design element, and can express ideas and feelings in addition to the words they spell out.

Fonts as a design element could be the subject of an entire presentation all by itself – well, that’s true of each of these elements. But I’ll focus on just a few important points for this discussion.

First, every brand must have a brand guide that dictates which fonts to use for the brand. Those fonts should be used in every situation EXCEPT for when a different font is required to get a message across. For instance, If you recall the Bentley Megafactory ad we looked at earlier, the font in that ad isn’t the font in Bentley’s brand book. But if you go to Bentley’s website, their fonts are used throughout the website.

So for larger format advertising, like a website or an annual report, the brand fonts should be used.

For ads, use fonts that best express the messaging of the ad (which could mean the brand fonts, if you’re sending a pure brand message). But it could also mean some more expressive fonts related to the point of the ad.

Finally, when it comes to fonts, less is always more. An well-designed ad can certainly express the idea of “chaos,” but the ad itself should never be chaotic – and one too many fonts can take a perfectly coherent message and make it messy and even unintelligible.

One of the biggest mistakes most non-graphic designers make is the mistake of filling up all the space. Space in an ad isn’t an empty place that needs filling. Space IS a graphic element, and it can be used to direct the eye, influence emotion, and emphasize your message.

The most basic understanding of space in advertising is that you want to use the space around content elements to draw attention to particular elements.  As you can see in this example from the Visme blog, where your eye focuses on the image in the left is a tossup between the astronaut and the moon. It’s not clear where the ads “wants” you to focus. But the image on the right makes it pretty clear that the focus should be the astronaut. They didn’t make the moon smaller – they just created much more space above it, which drew the eye to the astronaut and the idea of “space” itself – rather than the moon.  Of course, size and perspective are also used in this example.

Space can also be used as a message itself.

One of the most referenced examples of this graphic design technique is the FedEx logo, where the space between the E and the X is used to create an arrow – a very literal, and cheeky, reference to FedEx moving packages. The graphic designer of this element must have been particularly pleased with her or himself, because the arrow also aludes to the graphic design principle of “movement,” which is also achieved by thoughtful use of space.

The use of negative space can be quite elegant. It’s another way of using space to create emphasis. In my experience, it takes a particularly refined awareness of the relationships between items and space to create strong negative space image.

As with everything in graphic design, less is more. You want to strip down your elements to only the most important for conveying your message.

Another important consideration in your graphic design is where elements appear in relation to one another.  In its most basic sense, it helps the viewer make sense of the relationships and their relative importance to one another. Either of the images in the above graphic could be “correct”. If you were trying to make a point about female employees relative to make employees, you might use the image on the left. If you’re trying to make a point about teams of employees, you might use the image on the right. As with everything in graphic design, the intention of the message is what matters here.

Here’s another excellent example of the use of proximity, with a strong assist from the element of perspective. This map sends a strong message about how close together two continents actually are when you use FedEx. It also is yet another reminder of how great the graphic designers are that work on FedEx campaigns.

If you want to make your viewers uneasy or uncomfortable, fail the alignment test in your graphic design. Even though most people can’t tell you why it makes them feel uneasy, they feel it. Alignment provides order to your design. It relates to everything from how elements are arranged in space to how text is aligned.

There is no rule that suggests one type of alignment is better than the others. Text can be aligned to the left, center, or right, with or without “ragged” edges on the unaligned side or sides (both sides are going to be ragged in center aligned text. Graphical elements can also be aligned with left, right, or center orientations. What’s important is that the elements not look completely scattered and random like the image on the left. If you go out and look at nature, you will find that its patterns are remarkably ordered. Our human eye seeks alignment to guide it, and our psyches seem to find some comfort in the order that comes from alignment.

The rule of odds – which can be applied to a remarkable array of things, not just graphic design or photography – suggests that using an odd number of options or elements can create more focus and “stickiness” than using an even number.

You can apply the rule of odds to the number of elements in your graphic, or you can use it as a rule of thirds, and separate your palette into three equal sections.

The example here is about using odds in your composition of elements. This is one of the illustrations from Ed Verosky’s excellent tutorial on still-life photography. Each one of these elements, even if it includes an even number of objects, uses the rule of odds to create balance and focus. The relationship between objects conveys a lot of information very fast – beyond the objects’ relationships to one another, the relationships also suggest mood, energy, and movement. Using the rule of odds helps make your message more coherent, no matter what you’re trying to convey.

This example is also representative of the rule of odds – only instead of dictating how many objects are used in the design, it uses the 3-part grid to compose its message.  A similarly beautiful photograph, cropped less thoughtfully, would have far less energy and movement.

AS I’ve mentioned already, the average person sees 5,000 ads in a day, which means anything we can do to increase retention is extremely important Repetition can achieve that – it can increase comprehension and retention.

Repetition isn’t just something to use on one page though. It can be used in design to create cohesion among elements that are essentially different in shape or kind, things that otherwise would be hard to see as grouped together. For that reason, repetition is one of the favorite graphic design elements of packaging designers.

Shapes, objects, and font treatments like chapter headings and subheadings all  benefit from repetition to increase both focus and retention.

Some of the best graphic designers I have ever worked with shared a similar trait of drawing dots or lines through their sketchpads  before dropping elements onto the page. Once they had conceptualized the message, they had an idea of how they wanted to direct the viewer from their first encounter to comprehension. They used lines and grids to get that initial thought on paper.

As you saw earlier in that fabulous beach image, and can see again here in this illustration from Visme, lines can be literally present on the page, or they can be used suggestively through the use of a grid. In the first image, we can tell the man is running. In the second image, we FEEL like the man is moving. The imaginary line of the design is moving him right off the page.

In his excellent book on graphic design for children, Chip Kidd gives the  best example for understanding form. He suggests that you try to imagine yourself as a tiny baby without language. All you can do is perceive forms, and you try to interpret them. Colors, sizes, intensity, relativity – it’s all there, but what to make of it?  Eventually, you put language with form, but in the beginning, everything is just form.

As a graphic designer, you try to back away from the implicit meanings of things and experience the forms without the words.  How do the elements on the page, on the screen, or on the billboard make you feel? What is your impression of how things look?

Beyond visual hierarchies, there are some other things that must be considered in all graphic design activities. One of these is the idea that form follows function.

This is a graphic from Chip Kidd’s book . It’s the best example I’ve seen of how to understand the relationship between form and function.

Function is determined by solving the design problem. You ask the question “What is the content’s purpose? What is it trying to do? This purpose is called function. And once you determine it’s function, then its form – or what it is going to look like – should follow.

Graphic design is visual problem-solving. I need to get a message across, and I need to find the fastest, most impactful, most memorable way to do it. There is also a discipline called “design thinking,” which evolved out of many different design disciplines, and is a cross for creative problem solving. On this slide, you see the main 5 questions of design thinking. I like to keep these questions in mind when I am trying to solve a design problem – graphic or otherwise.

And that’s it! Those are the principles of design I wanted to talk about with you today. With these principles in mind, you can do a much better job of creating graphics to promote your business. Even if you aren’t the person doing the design, even if you’re working with a graphic designer, understanding these principles will help you give them better direction, and it will also help you better understand what your designers create based on your direction. And remember – just because something looks pretty, doesn’t mean it’s good design. And just because something looks plain, doesn’t mean it’s bad design! I hope you enjoyed this information, and thank you for your time and attention!

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but when it comes to buying, we're just not (oh - and wait until I address reason versus emotions in business decision-making, though that's another article entirely).

Consumers - female and male - buy based on emotion. No matter how many statistics and facts they line up on the way to making a buying decision, that data collection effort tends to  be done in the service of making the decision they want to make. 

But you already know that trust and connection are essential to closing sales. Now make sure that you are also speaking to emotions from the beginning of the process - including the merchandise you choose to offer and the messages you convey to browsers and shoppers - long before the customer lands in the store or the products land in the cart. 

In this month's article for InStore Magazine, I wrote about how the anxiety and disruption of 2020 will influence the shopping emotions of 2021. Read the article to see how the themes of comfort, tradition, and responsibility are the themes to merchandise and market to in the year to come.

Brilliance and charisma are exciting when we encounter them. Even more than beauty, they are the indelible elements that propel some people beyond ordinariness and into the public imagination. Brilliance and charisma are so compelling that we tend to assume that those with power and position have them, even though neither one of those are actually necessary to achieve power or position. But the lure of brilliance and charisma is so strong that we equate them with success.

I could have a blast writing about all the times that brilliance and charisma lead us astray (bad boy attraction, anyone?), but what I really want to write about in this moment is leadership, and how often we confuse good leadership with bad leadership, or no leadership at all.

It’s tempting, when we talk about leadership, to go straight for the leaders with brilliance and charisma as our examples. But what we miss in those discussions is the beating heart and soul of leadership, and the less sexy but profoundly good leaders among us who may not sparkle, but they show up every day and do the good work of leading.

Leaders aren’t just found in governments (large or small) or businesses. It takes leadership to run community organizations, non-profits, clubs and special interest groups, trade groups, choirs, community theater troupes, sports teams, and online discussion communities. It takes leadership to run schools, and organizations and clubs within those schools. It takes leadership to run families. Observe any 13-year-old with self-discipline who is propelling herself toward her future vision, and you are watching leadership-in-the-making.

The first requirement of a good leader is character; responsibility, respect for others, honesty and trustworthiness, fairness, caring and empathy, and concern for community. These attributes are essential for good leadership.

The reason character matters so much is that when someone assumes a leadership role, they are entrusted with power, while simultaneously becoming the target of other people’s agendas. A weak person in that position may put their self-interest above the group, or find it difficult to navigate the pressures of everyone else’s demands, or be unable to maintain clarity about the goals and progress of the group. Good character provides the essential internal framework for a leader to balance ego and altruism, to weigh individual interests and greater good.

After character, a good leader requires the ability to develop a vision. The vision may be as simple as helping a group of friends read and discuss one good book each month, or as complex as leading a country, but all leaders are tasked with getting a group of people from Point A to Point B. Figuring out what Point B is, and then creating a plan to get there, is the work of leadership. A leader without a point, a plan, an agenda, is just a person with power and perhaps a bigger paycheck.

Developing a vision is not the same as having a vision. Entrepreneurs are a great example of this disconnect. Entrepreneurs tend to be people with a vision, and they often end up leading a group of people when achieving the vision alone isn’t a possibility. Steve Jobs was a great visionary, but he wasn’t a particularly good leader. Elon Musk is a great visionary, but a terrible leader. Brilliance. Charisma. Sparkle.

Developing a vision involves surrounding oneself with smart people, capable people, experienced people, and enlisting their ideas and knowledge to gain clarity and create a roadmap. The way to spot a great leader is to look for great teams. In the midst of those teams will be someone who is motivating, teaching, listening, keeping the team aligned, and helping the swarm stay on the path to the vision they have defined together. Leaders use their great character as the bedrock upon which great teams can be formed, they use their teams to develop a vision, and they empower those teams to pursue that vision.

Leadership is about accomplishing something. It’s not about permanence. It can last for a week, or months, or years. But during that time, a leader makes sure something gets done, that the group is better off when they leave, that goals were set, and achieved, and everybody involved grew along the way.

America has just lived through an era where a man who claimed to be powerful and rich benefitted from the assumption that if one can become powerful and rich, he must be about something. He must be a leader. We tend to take attributes like being tall, or beautiful, or muscular, or born into wealth, or born into an influential social network, and confer upon them the mantle of leader.

We need to stop being so fascinated with the individual sparklers. To have a functioning family, club, organization, business, community, nation, or world, we must have a proper understanding of what to expect from our leaders, and from ourselves when we are leading. We must always look for substance, for the people with character, for the people who invested in their own knowledge and capabilities with rigor and humility, and built upon their experience brick by brick. Because when good leaders are in place, they harness the best of everyone around them, and everyone begins to sparkle. And when that happens, we can light up the clubhouse. We can light up the world.

When Will We Start Treating Lab-Grown Diamonds Like a Product Instead of Like an Intruder?

The jewelry industry continues to take polarized positions on lab-grown. It seems like every time we've grown past this debate, another social media group comes to virtual blows over the topic. I'm not surprised - it was the same conversation when Chatham first started offering lab-grown emeralds and rubies. But it's not useful. Not to us, not to our customers.

You don't see grocery stories saying, "we won't carry organic/gluten-free/paleo/pick-a-theme" groceries because they interfere with our other grocery sales. They evaluate consumer interest and potential demand, and offer choices. Fashion has done this with alternative fabrics. Car companies had a harder time doing it with alternative fuels, but that's largely because of the expense of tooling up to produce new equipment coupled with wanting government assistance to do so.

When it comes to lab-grown diamonds, we get all tied up in our shoestrings with our own preferences, fears, and perceptions, and in the process lose sight of the customers.

In the most recent social media post and following thread, I saw all the same black-or-white arguments. Diamond mining concerns are doing great! So much change! Mined diamonds are terrible, so much abuse. Lab-grown diamonds are not ecologically friendly - so much electricity! Lab-grown diamond producers are abusive, they're all in (pick a country). None of these tropes serve the industry, our businesses, or our customers. But if we're going to have honest conversations and learn from each other, we need to get comfortable with shades of gray - because that's all there are right now.

Shades of Gray Shadow Both Mined and Lab-Grown
The social and ecological issues are very challenging to sort. Tens of millions of artisanal miners around the world rely on mining to feed their families. Anything we do in the mining sector must be done not only with regard for their health and safety while mining — but also with regard to their health if they cannot mine. In that regard, the pandemic is causing horrific food insecurity around the world.

Want to help support artisanal miners suffering from food security caused by the pandemic?

On the other hand, diamonds do not "do good" yet. Not by a long shot. They are "doing better," and better is a good direction to go in. So we must keep applying pressure on the mined diamond front.

But let's never demean progress. The natural diamond sector was pretty bad for a long time, they've made progress, and if we treat progress as an all-or-nothing proposition, it tends to stop. We don't want that.

So, are lab-grown diamonds a more or less ethical solution? Like natural diamonds, it all depends. If you're talking about factories abusing their labor, then no. But just because a factory is in China doesn't mean it's abusive. I spend a lot of time in manufacturing facilities around the world, and I've seen rotten treatment of employees everywhere — including in the United States — and excellent treatment of employees everywhere — including in China.

Are lab-grown diamonds more or less ecologically sound? Again, it depends. I know of growers working to use the most responsible power generation possible, and some that don't care about that at all. Until lab-grown producers start disclosing some of those details, it's just impossible to know.

But, if you have a customer who has a really hard time with the concept of digging and blowing holes in the earth, then lab-grown may be the flavor of "responsible" she's looking for. I don't agree with making green statements that can't be validated, but I'm uncomfortable with blanket statements that lab-grown producers are all disruptable too.

Which Holds Its Value Better (Hint: It's a Red Herring)

Do lab-grown diamonds hold their value for the future? That's a laugh — a discussion we shouldn't even be having. Not because lab-grown will or won't hold their value for the future — nobody knows that yet! It's a laugh, because mined diamonds don't hold their value. We should never treat diamonds of any sort as if they are a financial instrument. A very small number of collectors in the ultra-rare mined color diamond sector do use diamonds as a financial investment, but that's it. We should never make any promises or inferences to customers about the future value of a diamond.

Should you Sell Lab-Grown Diamonds?

So - should you or should you not sell lab-grown? Well, you could base that on your own preferences, fears, and biases, but I'll suggest that's a terrible business approach. You should make every business decision based on your businesses core values (which are different than biases), and on the desires and interests of your customers. It won't be the same answer for everyone, nor should it be. If analyze this question with intellectual rigor, self-awareness, and deep interest in your customers, you'll have the right answer - and nobody else can tell you otherwise.

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Build the Ultimate Competitive Edge

I have been a student of creativity for most of life. My original career goal was to be an opera singer - I'm a mezzo soprano. So I trained all through adolescence and studied drama and music at university. But what I saw there quickly turned me off forever to a career in opera. In that world, everyone was fixated on having a competitive edge. The intense focus on standing out individually ultimately isolated everyone from the collaboration that would make us exponentially better together. I found my solace in jazz — quite the opposite of opera.

Jazz performance depends on one's ability to intensely listen to and feel one's fellow musicians; to complement them rather than compete with them. I learned that the very best musician experience — at least for me — was the art of completely blending in and becoming part of a "body" of creativity that was bigger than myself. It is this experience that informed my  business ideas about how to create a competitive edge.

Some people think that radical inclusiveness hides mediocrity. And it can. But what I learned as a jazz musician is that each instrument and voice has to be the absolute best for the ensemble to be the best. It's not that we sacrifice excellence — it's that excellence is each of our individual gift to the whole, so the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

I've worked with many jazz ensembles (and choirs - a magnificent choir has the same allure) over the years. Some were merely a diversion. Others, I got such a thrill out of working with I wanted to sing with them every night. The difference? Part of it was individual excellence for sure. It's magical to work with extremely talented people. But mostly the difference was in the bond, trust, and respect within the group. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it is strong enough to welcome new-comers and still maintain its cultural/artistic core. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it can bring in a student, an apprentice, and help them achieve virtuosity quickly. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it experiences explosive creativity.

And when you're experiencing explosive creativity, the concept of competitive edge becomes mundane. Why settle for being better than the next guy, when you can be better than your own imagination?

These things I learned as a musician quickly carried over into my business life. First, I noticed that some teams were more effective than others. Then, I realized it was more cultural — not just a team issue, but a company issue. Some companies experience almost virtuosic, sustained, creativity and innovation. But most do not. And the difference isn't determined by the individual talents and skills of the employees. The difference is determined by the quality of shared vision and trust. Trust in one another, and trust in leadership.

There are many things leaders must do to create trust: clarity of vision, consistent behavior, accountability for failures. But the one thing I want to address today is equality.

If a company wants to experience sustained excellence, it must invest in a culture of equality. This doesn't mean everyone is the same. Strong companies are built on teams of subject matter experts (SMEs), individuals with unique strengths and talents that can be applied in different ways. Each individual also has weaknesses, but if you build the right team, no one weakness will stand out, because it will be offset by the strengths of those around them. So everyone is not "the same," nor do we want them to be. When it comes to taking on certain projects, entrusting people with certain objectives, then we lean on expertise, talent, and capability. We recognize that some people have more talent and skill for some things than others.

But outside of the creative or skilled output — when it comes to the humans in the workshop, troupe, or company — then everyone must be equal. One set of rules for everyone. One set of expected behaviors for everyone. Rewards equally available to everyone. I'm not saying everyone gets paid the same. But everyone must know that their pay is based on objective factors related to their responsibility and tasks — not based on subjective, opaque criteria.

Equality means choosing inclusiveness over exclusiveness every chance you get. If you are the leader, equality means challenging your own preferences constantly. What do I mean by that? Well, as humans we gravitate to some people more than others — it's natural. As a leader, you must constantly check yourself, to make sure that your own behavior doesn't create a sense of inequality where one is not intended. This is really hard — in my opinion as someone who has led many companies, it is the hardest thing to do, and one of the things I have most consistently failed at.

Without equality, the dynamics of the group suffer, which damages the results of the group. Since the only reason that group is assembled is for their shared goals, why would you risk damaging the group in any way?

It can be difficult to teach the importance of equality to business leaders — particularly those fueled with a sense of competitiveness. There is a tendency to think that equality is a kindergarten platitude. But it's not. It's a business imperative. If we want to be the best, we have to hire the best, yes. And then, we have to treat them the best.

Because ultimately, each one of us is not the sum of our parts. We don't bring just our relevant skills to work each day. We bring our whole selves. And we expect to be honored. At some level, each of us knows that we are a reflection of godliness, and therefore . . . equal. Fail to honor that, and you fail the one element that will make your company (or your family, or your team, or your club, or your musical troupe) exquisitely successful. The human.

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To Succeed in Business, You Need to Play the Long Game

 In this six-minute video, Andrea Hill talks about the importance of using your marketing strategy to build a long game of exponential value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiUx9ITD2M

 Transcript

I’m thinking a lot the past few days about how hard it is to play the long game in business. It requires several things most people lack: trust in the future, confidence about their choices, and patience. The requirement for a long-game is true in many areas of your business, but nowhere is it more stark than in the area of creating a meaningful online marketing presence.

When social media first hit the scene in 2007-2008, we were all struck by the instant-ness of it all. I think of an idea, I write it, I publish it. I come up with an idea for a visual, I turn it into a graphic, I post it. Fast, fast fast, right? The problem, is that the ability to produce and post things quickly has nothing to do with creating customer awareness or becoming a fixture of their consciousness. That is slow work, tedious work, and it takes a long time to see results. Because in today’s marketing environment, success isn’t measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. Let me say that again, because what I just described to you is the most basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Success isn’t measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. When we talk about telling stories online, when we talk about creating rich content, what we’re talking about is all the words and phrases you bake into your website that will help a searching person find a product or a service you offer. And that takes time.

Time isn’t the only thing – it also requires a strong CMS website. It requires the creation of lots of good content across articles and products and promotions on your website, and it requires patience as you build out that content over time, and that content gets turned into links by search engines. But time . . . time is the thing that most small business owners underestimate. After all, in the past, you could run a radio ad, and a few people would come in off the street as a result of it. You could run a TV ad or a newspaper ad, and you could see pretty quickly if there was a response. You can run those same ads today, and you might even have a few people respond. The problem is that today’s consumers are completely distracted by whatever is happening on their smart phone, they are inundated with marketing messages everywhere they look and listen, and they aren’t “shopping around” for products like they did in the past. They do their shopping online, and then – if they like what they see – they come into the store to buy (and yes, 90% of all purchases are still happening in a store).

In a recent report on retail, the NRF, or National Retail Federation, reminded its membership that it’s not about “online versus retail.” It’s about “retail dependance on online.”  Today’s consumers see online marketing as a seamless part of their retail experience, as they search online for products, knowledge, and references, and then seek products out in stores and in-person. And, how do those consumers FIND your business so you can be the store they walk into? Using search. They search for what they seek, they drill into the links that show the most promise, they check out the ratings and reviews of the seller and the products, and then they decide where to go to buy. The creation of that website content, leading to meaningful links, takes time. The creation of a strong system of references and reviews – which we call Social Proof – takes time. And patience. And more time.

But here’s the interesting thing. In the first two or three months, it feels like you are doing a lot of work for absolutely no results. Then, in the four to six month range, you start to see tiny benefits, but it’s hard to trust them. Then, if you’ve been super disciplined and continued to develop content despite the fear and frustration, at around one year you really start to see results. They begin to build slowly and steadily.

When I first started my blog in 2006, I had a grand total of three readers, and I was related to all three of them. Now, 13 years later, my blog drives thousands of visitors per day to my websites. All those blog posts over all those years serve as links to my online presence. I don’t pay for any advertising beyond my blog, because the rich content I have put on the internet is all the marketing I need. Of course, 13 years is a long time. You won’t have to wait that long to see results – and if you are selling jewelry or other luxury goods, you will need other marketing tools besides a blog. I just use that as an example of the exponential power of rich content.

What you need to remember is that a year or two is not very much time at all. You also need to remember that this IS the way marketing and selling work now. So if you haven’t already, you need to commit to a long game of content creation, so that a year from now, you have already made significant progress. After all – the time is going to go by either way. What do you want to have to show for your business’s marketing presence when next year rolls around?

I am fixated lately on the topic of outstanding customer service. As a road-warrior and constant consumer of restaurant, hotel, car rental, coffee shop, salon, apparel, and convenience store services domestically and abroad, in community sizes ranging from tiny Iowa towns to London, I suspect I encounter a reasonable approximation of what customer service means today. What I have encountered is a strange dichotomy.

Customer Service Out, Customer Service Culture In

On the one hand, excellent customer service is no longer treated as a differentiator by consumers. Twenty years ago, a business could set itself apart by touting its fantastic service. Advertising one’s customer service prowess or awards for customer service meant something to consumers, and it was often excellent service that businesses chose to feature in taglines. Today, excellent service is a minimum standard necessary to compete. Boasting about or branding with excellent customer service is like advertising an automobile and saying, "It runs! It goes up to 75 mph!"

On the other hand, excellent customer service can be very difficult to find, even in the luxury sector. At a time when consumer expectations regarding service are higher than ever, why aren’t businesses stepping up and delivering?

Because excellent – no, outstanding – customer service is one of the hardest things to do. You can’t automate it. You can’t script it or cookie-cutter it. You can’t ensure it with policy or rules. Excellent customer service is about people, and people run on motivation.

When I refer to customer service, I’m not just talking about direct personal interactions. Think of all the people in non-customer facing roles that have significant influence over how the customer feels about the company:

• The web developer that cares about customer experience creates shopping interfaces that are simple, fast, and efficient and filter or search functions that quickly provide the right answers.
• The systems person that creates strong data warehouse tools helps customer-facing team-members quickly find and deliver information to interested customers.
• The purchasing staffer who does such thoughtful forecasting and planning that the right products are in the right places at the right times – so customers can find them.
• The CFO who supports the creation of simple, easy return policies to ensure customer satisfaction.
• The marketing team member who thoughtfully manages customer lists to ensure that the most relevant email campaigns go to each list subscriber.
• The production worker who looks for the tiniest errors to ensure a customer never finds one.
• The shipping clerk who packs every box as if the contents are fragile and going to his own mother.

To deliver outstanding customer service, a company must motivate every single employee in every single role to think about how his or her work will affect the customer.

Outstanding Customer Service Starts with the Right Ingredients

I do not believe in the adage you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But I do believe that our essential ingredients – personality, character, and self-discipline – are fairly set by the time we reach adulthood. The truth is, some people are wired to deliver an outstanding customer experience because they are empathetic, interested in others, and motivated to serve. If the people you hire don’t start with those essential characteristics, no amount of training, cajoling, or threatening will induce them to become passionate service people.

But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? Because those aren’t the only ingredients you need. When you hire a sales person who must deliver outstanding customer service, they must combine empathy and service-orientation with self-confidence and the ability to influence someone to part with their cash. On the other hand, if you are hiring a nurse, you need a person who combines empathy and service orientation with the ability to handle tremendous pressure, mete out pain, and deliver difficult news with pragmatic calm, all while keeping the patients from becoming frightened. An airline attendant must combine empathy and service orientation with vigilance. These are three very different recipes.

The Human Resource function has evolved to do a much better job of finding the best ingredients and matching them with roles and teams, and many new business tools and practices are available to support best practices in hiring, onboarding, and training. But are most businesses using these tools? Unscientific research (i.e., observation) would suggest that they are not. If you invest in one area of improvement for your service-dependent business this year, do a better job of matching the right people with the right teams and jobs.

Pre-Employment Assessments that Help You Build a Customer Service Culture

First You Solve the Processes . . .

The full saying goes, first you solve the process, then you solve the people. The source of most people-problems at work is process problems. If your processes are unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, inconsistent or – worse! – nonexistent, your people cannot give consistent – let alone outstanding – service. Make sure that your business processes are simple, effective, complete (which means no opportunities to drop the ball), documented, and trained. In that order. Let’s do that again:

1. Simple
2. Effective
3. Complete (this means that each process design is complete, from beginning to completion and monitoring)
4. Documented
5. Trained

Walk into any company that delivers consistently outstanding customer service, and you’ll find excellent process management. Why? Because the end result – outstanding customer service – is dependent on each company defining what service means according to its own brand and standards, defining the services that deliver the required level of care, and being able to train all employees involved in each service area to deliver the same services in the same ways.

Outstanding Service Comes from Effective Management

Good management is essential to business success. Too many businesses approach management as a personality trait, or the thing we do when we’re creating schedules, granting time off, or creating reports. In fact, great management comes from two terms that are not terribly in vogue these days, concepts that seem related to old, hierarchical models of business: command and control. But when you break these concepts down and examine the details, you see how important they are.

Command

I use the term command because it’s still the term that is taught in business schools and recognized as one of the pillars of management. Other effective terms would be influence, motivate, and inspire. In fact, “lead” is the concept we’re going after, but in management theory terms, leadership is more than just this element. So, what is a manager supposed to be doing in this regard? Command is about having a clear vision, communicating it to the team, and ensuring that the team achieves its objectives. Communication skill is critical, because constant, effective communication helps a group of people embrace and share a common set of goals. A manager with a grasp on command creates an environment where people understand what is expected, have enough information to buy into the goals and objectives, are excited about the pursuit of excellence, and are clear that failure to deliver on the team’s goals will result in consequences.

Control

Control is not about controlling people – it’s about controlling the way in which the work is done and whether or not the work is done correctly. Processes, procedures, efficiency, and structure are the domain of control. Good managers not only communicate expectations and motivate people to do as required (command), they also create project plans, delegate activities, evaluate, monitor, measure, and share progress with their teams.

If you’re not being successful in the management areas of command and control, then it is unlikely that your team is capable of delivering outstanding customer service.

Culture is the Binding Agent

A company’s culture is the glue that binds all the important elements of the company together. A strong, positive business culture reinforces the brand, and in the best examples, defines it. The culture of a workplace determines and reflects employee commitment. To create a company culture that will nurture and serve customers, you must have a culture that nurtures and serves employees. Please don’t confuse nurturing with coddling – they are not the same. Employees want to be treated as professionals, with dignity and respect. Study after study demonstrates that employees who are trusted and expected to perform admirably will rise to the occasion.

A strong, positive business culture is created by thoughtful leadership, the right people in the right roles, good processes, strong management, and positive, goal-oriented behavior.

Every business culture is different, but all should include these ingredients. Without a strong culture, you cannot achieve outstanding customer service.

I’ve heard people blame today’s lack of customer service on the continued automation of service, reduced congeniality in society, or on an angrier, more demanding workforce. There may be particles of truth in all that, but I don't think those are the core reasons. Rather, what I observe in both the businesses I patronize and those I consult, is that the frantic pace of business combined with frequent economic and social uncertainty causes business owners and executives to work in a very tactical manner. This leaves little time for thinking about and managing the basics, and does not lend itself to long-term thinking and planning. Which, among other problems, erodes the company’s ability to deliver outstanding customer service.

Delivering outstanding customer service is one of the most critical things a business must do, particularly at a time when consumers expect nothing less. The good news is that dedication to known management fundamentals is half the battle. What will be harder for many companies is the creation of a strong, positive business culture. In fact, strong, positive business culture may be the differentiator of the future. A worthy, rewarding goal to shoot for.

Ready to hire outstanding customer service people? Use Andrea Hill's highly informative, immediately useful handbook, "The How-to-Hire-Handbook for Small Business Owners," and make better hiring decisions today!

This week, at Initiatives in Art and Culture’s Gold Conference, the opening evening event – normally reserved for an outing at an atelier or exhibit – was instead devoted to a panel on issues facing women in the jewelry industry.

The topic of gender bias is hardly unique to our industry. But as a small industry, it is perhaps more important to our overall success and more difficult to discuss than for other industries.I won’t try to recap the conversation in a linear way. I don’t think I could. Hedda Schupak kicked things off by asking the panel how the jewelry industry was managing gender bias relative to other industries, and within three or four minutes, the entire audience was involved in the conversation.

Immediately, women began telling their stories. One woman’s career was ruined by a male colleague's idea of a  “joke.” He liked to tell their co-workers that she had slept her way to her current position. After being passed over for promotions for which she was more than qualified, she approached Human Resources. The HR representative told her that the belief she had been sleeping with higher-ups had led to her being passed over. An investigation discredited the male colleague and his “joke,” but it didn’t matter. Her career there could not recover. She transferred to a different company, and the male colleague suffered no consequences.

Another woman, a senior marketing executive, spoke of advocating to be included in a major advertising agency meeting as part of a powerful diamond industry group. She was the only trained marketing executive in the group, and the only woman — in a market that sells almost exclusively to women. And yet, when the meetings commenced, they made her leave the room. It was humiliating for her (and genuinely stupid of the men).

Participants spoke of women in our industry being belittled, ignored, talked over, humiliated, passed by for promotions. Groped. Raped. Trapped in jobs they could not afford to leave. Of women contemplating suicide.

At one point during this free-wheeling discussion, a women in the audience expressed how upset she was with the panel. She said she had expected this to be a positive experience, claiming, “All I'm hearing is negativity! Stop with all the man vs. woman stuff! ” I could see that several women agreed — and many more empathized — with her.

Then I looked at the faces of some of the men I know well — some alone, and some with their wives. Men who would gladly make gender discrimination disappear. It occurred to me how difficult this conversation must be for them. Yet, I could see that these men were fully present, along with us for the pain and discomfort, willing to listen, learn, and participate. And I could see that none of their wives felt the need to shield them, nor make excuses for them. These wives trusted – and expected – their husbands to handle it.

Painful Things are Hard to Discuss

Ask anyone who has ever been on the brink of divorce, only to turn the corner and go on to have a stronger marriage, what changed. You will almost certainly hear that they finally learned to discuss the hard things in a productive manner. Not necessarily a positive manner — it’s practically impossible to have a hard conversation without saying difficult things, and difficult can be scary and painful. But productive conversations lead to positive outcomes.

This isn't just a painful topic. It's a confusing topic. So much of what we know about being men and women, and communicating with one another, is indoctrinated, inculturated social behavior. Much of what we enjoy about hanging out with members of the opposite sex is the dynamic tension and and perspective that comes from being different from one another. But we aren't really equal, are we? When two groups come together to share experiences and work, and one group has inherently more power than the other, even seemingly innocuous statements and behaviors can be fraught with hidden meanings and interpretations. So there are sandtraps and land mines everywhere we turn.

It's also very difficult to understand privilege from the perspective of privilege.

One of the things it is hard for men to recognize is how insidious gender bias is. Most men would agree that groping and rape are wrong. But what about all the other behaviors that undermine women? Studies demonstrate that women are expected to answer phones, set up meetings, fill out paperwork, take meeting notes, fetch beverages, bring or order food for office events, and head thankless committees at more than twice the rate of their male peers working the same jobs. Women are still treated as a servant class within business.

Men are more likely to take calls from other men, more likely to return voice mails left by other men, and take chances on men when making decisions about investments. In other words, men have more access to power and money than women have. They are also the often unconscious beneficiaries of presumed excellence. According to Forbes magazine, “when symphony orchestras started using blind auditions by placing candidates behind screens and drapes, the number of women in the five leading orchestras in the US increased five-fold.”

Women Still Lack Representation in Jewelry Business

In the jewelry industry, it is difficult to identify the percentage of women in leadership, as so much of the industry is very private and family-owned. However, of nine major jewelry industry associations, women make up only 20.5% of overall board seats. This is a far cry from the 50.8% of US population represented by women, or the fact that – other than engagement rings (which, even if men buy them, women still heavily influence) – women make a whopping 78% of women’s jewelry purchases (and wear over 90% of all jewelry sold).

When women cannot penetrate places of power, and cannot benefit from the same presumed excellence that men experience, it damages our ability to improve our lives.

The solution to these problems isn’t A) try harder and B) be patient. We’ve been trying damn hard, and we’ve been more than patient. The solution is for men to make a point of bringing women into their circles of power. If every enlightened man would do that for just two women, how fast could things change? Educated, qualified, hard-working women are extremely easy to find. If you’re reading this and you don't (realize you) know some of these women, give me a call. I’ll be happy to make the introductions.

In addition to issues of access, presumed excellence, and equal treatment, many women on the panel and in the audience agreed that sexual harassment continues to be an issue in our industry. Jenny Luker and Brandee Dallow talked about the sexual harassment training initiative the Women's Jewelry Association (WJA) has put together with the Jeweler's Vigilance Committee (JVC) to educate jewelry  businesses. We need this training at all levels. If people won't stop harassing one another because it's the right thing to do, then at least let them be aware of the legal consequences. If you have never been through a sexual harassment training before, please avail yourself of it immediately. Apparently, character and ethics are not sufficient to solve this problem. So let's all get educated. The more of us who understand what sexual harassment is, the more likely we are to take the proper legal action when it occurs.

But what about all the behavior that is discriminating, yet doesn't meet the threshold of illegal?

The Difference Between Sexual Harassment and Hostile Work Environment

I am a big fan of public shaming. It doesn't happen often enough, because women are trained to politely laugh off inappropriate comments and behavior, and men are trained not to notice it (or to not go against other men). But imagine this: What if, every time one of us – male or female – heard someone else (male or female) make a gender discriminating comment, we said, “That’s not cool. Don’t say things like that.” Publicly, calmly, in-the-moment. If we consistently shamed the behavior, the intentional discriminators would become intimidated, and the obtuse would (hopefully) become educated.

It’s unrealistic to expect people to stand up for themselves in this way. If you’ve ever been at the receiving end of a personal attack, even a joking one, then you know it can take your breath away and leave you feeling unable to respond until after the moment has passed. We must step up and denounce discriminatory behavior for others.

Where's My Prize?

Later that evening and again the next day, several people asked why some are women so averse to discussing the topic of gender bias. I suspect that some have simply drunk the social Kool Aid. Issues of gender bias are currently all caught up in our divisive political discourse - though frankly, they shouldn't be identified with any political position at all. Some people don’t like to think deeply and resent being required to do so.

But some women are carrying around the pain and shame of their own victimization, and self-preservation demands that they keep it buried. My heart goes out to them. It takes a lot of resilience to discuss terrible things that have happened in the past. And now, I have another insight, which came from a woman in her 30s who was in attendance. As we left the building that evening, she asked me – her eyes filled with tears – “Where’s my prize for sucking it up all these years? Because that’s what I’ve had to do."

That, perhaps, is one of the hardest things to explain to gender-discrimination-deniers and the chauvinism-blind. How we suck it up. How we laugh it off. Not because we want to. Not because we think it’s funny. Not because we aren’t humiliated and angry and sick of it. Tired of it. All of it.

As Barbara Palumbo said, we suck it up because this may be the only jewelry company in town, and we can’t afford to spend 15 years in a different industry learning new skills and getting back to what we are earning now. We suck it up because we don’t want to move away from family and friends to do work we love, work that supports our families. We suck it up because the next place could be just as bad, so why make the sacrifice in the first place?

One of my male colleagues asked me the next day, “Is it any better? Is it getting better?” And I told him, yes, it is. If I compare now to the late 1970s, the statistics support (and I’ve seen) a steady, incremental, improvement. But better isn’t the same as fixed, and gender discrimination is still a real problem that holds us back and leaves women more vulnerable to violence and poverty than men will ever experience.

I do feel bad for some men right now. Men who would never use the phrase “like a girl,” or discount a woman. Men who are conscious that, even though they don’t discriminate, they bear the burden of being part of the solution. These men must take accountability for their gender to make things right. These men suffer the skepticism and distrust of this moment; distrust they haven’t done anything personally to earn.

I even have some compassion for the tin-eared men who say inflammatory things about women because they think they are being funny. Men who may be good husbands and fathers, but who struggle to understand their own bias in order to overcome it. This can be a painful, confusing process. I hope they are tough enough to stick with it and get through it.

But I could never, ever feel bad for men the way I feel bad for women. From the mouthy to the meek, young to old, optimistic to jaded — women have put up with men’s insistence on our second-class personhood while expecting us to keep their homes, extended families, and communities functioning for over a millennium. We’re so conditioned to this bullshit that we don’t recognize it when we do it to each other.

So we must have these hard conversations. We must vent, and listen, and strengthen one another. We may have to re-hash the topic many more times, because we’ve been holding it in for so long, and real change requires a lot of attention. These conversations will help us confess our pain, find our support networks, put on our armor, then get out there and change our world. One chaotic, painful, and exhilarating panel at a time.

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Thank you to Lisa Koenigsberg, PhD, founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture, for making this panel happen at the 8^th Annual Gold Conference. Thanks also to Hedda Schupak, panel moderator, and panelists Wendy Brandes, Brandee Dallow, Jenny Luker, and Barbara Palumbo.

Data published in Tim Smedley’s "The Inclusive Workplace" found that teams that are representative of their target client are up to 158 percent more likely to understand their client. No wonder the diamond industry is in such a mess right now.

Gender Makeup of Jewelry Industry Boards

References

Bergstein, R. (2017, August 9). Female Self-Purchasing Isn't Just a Jewelry Industry Pipedream. Forbes.

Catalyst. (2018). Women's Representation on Fortune 500 Boards Inches Upwards. New York: Catalyst.

Joan C. Williams, R. D. (2014). What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know. New York and London: New York University Press.

M. E. Heiulman, J. J. (2005). Same Behavior, Different Consequences: Reactions to Men's and Women's Altruistic Citizenship Behavior. APA PsycNET, 10.

Pham, T. (2016, December 20). Think You're Not Biased Against Women at Work? Read This. Forbes.

Sheryl Sandberg, A. G. (2015, February 6). Madam CEO, Get Me a Coffee. New York Times.

Smedley, T. (2014, May 15). The Evidence is Growing - There Really is a Business Case for Diversity. Financial Times.

Tristan L. Botelho, M. A. (2017). Research: Objective Performance Metrics Are Not Enough to Overcome Gender Bias. Harvard Business Review.

Williams, J. C. (2014, April 16). Sticking Women with the Office Housework. Wall Street Journal, p. 1.

Sexual harassment isn’t about sex. It’s about power.

Where sexual harassment begins and where it ends isn’t always clear. Is a dirty joke sexual harassment? Is a lewd look sexual harassment? If your co-workers are constantly dropping f-bombs in the next cubicle, is that sexual harassment or just garden-variety rudeness? And what about paying a man with the same experience 30% more than what you pay a woman in the same job with the same experience? Is that sexual harassment? Is it gender inequality? And what is the difference? Some people use the lack of clarity around sexual harassment as a reason to dismiss it.  So let’s break it down.

Some situations are very clear. If an employer tells an employee “have sex with me or I’ll fire you,” that’s sexual harassment.

The word “or” in that sentence (have sex with me OR . . . ) is the most important word. Consider these threats for a moment:

• Have sex with me or . . .
• Put up with me rubbing your back or . . .
• Let me put my hand on your thigh or . . .
• Don’t complain about my lecherous comments to you or . . .
• Allow me to look down your blouse or . . .

If the person saying or doing those things is your boss or a person with greater power than you in an organization, then what follows the or – even if it is only implied – can be pretty scary. Or you’ll get fired. Or you won’t get a raise. Or you won’t get a bonus. Or you won’t get a promotion. The powerful person in this scenario is in a position to demand a quid pro quo: you do something for me, and I’ll do something for you. If you don't, you'll suffer a consequence.

If the person doing or saying those things is your peer or subordinate, then what follows the “or?” Or I’ll stop trying? Or I’ll go bother someone else? Or I’ll try to steal your sale? The person in this scenario is not capable of demanding a quid pro quo. He (or she) is, however, creating a hostile work environment.

But quid pro quo sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment are also something else. They are a terrible abuse of power. That power may be the power of the paycheck, or it may be the power of being larger, stronger, influential among your peer group, or simply capable of making you miserable every day. Either way, the result is the same – a human being who is afraid and angry and doesn’t want to be at work.

Claims of quid pro quo sexual harassment, hostile work environment, and gender inequality have all been leveled at Signet, and Signet has vigorously and consistently refuted them for over 10 years. When discussing this issue among my peers, I was told repeatedly, “But they’re innocent until proven guilty!”

Read About What Happened During the Gold Conference Panel on Gender Bias

But riddle me this Batman: How does a company get to the point where 69,000 of its current and former employees are participating in class action suits against it? Two employee class actions and a new shareholder class action, all stemming from accusations of rampant sexual harassment and pay disparity claims over several decades.

In general, companies find themselves facing sexual harassment lawsuits when they cultivate a culture in which abuse of power is a norm. This type of culture doesn’t just happen in large corporations. It may be happening in yours, even if there is no sex or groping involved. Because sexual harassment isn’t ultimately about sex. It’s about power.

Anyone in an organization with the ability to influence hiring, firing, pay, and promotions has power. This is typically an owner, an executive, or a manager, but it could also be an influential spouse, child, sibling, or adviser. Such power must be wielded with great care.

• The manager who automatically pays men a higher wage than women for doing the same work is abusing power.
• The boss who screams at and demeans employees is abusing power. After all, if he didn’t have the power to terminate their employment, why would his employees even put up with such behavior?
• The manager who insists that employees tell her how they voted is abusing power. After all, if she were just some random stranger on the street, her employees would tell her, “that’s none of your business!”
• The executive who tells his assistant, “I’d like you to start wearing more dresses, and keep the lengths above the knee,” is abusing power. After all, if he were a co-worker or some guy at the coffee shop, the woman would likely say, “why would I let you tell me how to dress?”
• The business owner who butts in on his employees’ lives outside of work, demanding that they answer phones when not working, lecturing them about their personal lives, or expecting them to listen to his opinions about their boyfriends, parenting skills, and vacation plans is abusing power. Unless that employee is also the business owner’s son or daughter, he has no right to an opinion about their lives outside of work.

What is not an abuse of power? Anything that is relevant to the achievement of the business goals, portrayal of the business brand, and critical to business success that is also applied to everyone in a given role in exactly the same way.

Why is sexual harassment such a hot-button issue? Because the abuse of power in a work environment so often expresses itself in the form of sexual overtones. Psychologists and sociologists have written extensively about why this is, but it all boils down to this: A person who is not inclined to use power to dominate others is unlikely to sexually harass others. But for people who like using their power to take what they want, sexual dominance is often one of the things they want.

If you look at an organization where sexual harassment appears to be rampant, you will see other problems as well. You will see an organization with different sets of rules for different sets of people. You will see favoritism, unequal pay, and unequal access to perks and opportunities. You will see a general atmosphere of fear and insecurity. You will see an organization where those not in power try to survive by staying under the radar. You will likely see as many unhappy men as unhappy women, but they will be unhappy about different things. And eventually, you will see an organization whose internal dysfunction seeps outside to its customers, in the form of poor service, unethical behavior, and erratic performance.

It takes tremendous character not to be corrupted by power. Yet anyone in a position of authority has power, and that power can be used wisely or for selfish reasons. If an organization is permissive of the abuse of power in any form, it’s just a few short steps to someone in the organization using his power to touch a woman inappropriately, comment on her appearance or sexual appeal, or suggest that she give him sexual favors.

Of course, no organization is immune from someone in its ranks abusing a subordinate or fellow employee, but there’s a big difference in the response. In an organization that is not permissive of abusive behavior, such actions will be reprimanded in the strongest terms.  In an organization that is permissive of power abuse, a complaint about sexual harassment will be met with denial, shaming, blaming, or framing the accuser. People who are victimized in the future will be silent, for fear of reprisals.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that a culture permissive of power abuse is bad for business. Sure, the business may do well for a period of time, as long as market conditions are favorable. But eventually, the negative aspects of the culture will have a damaging effect on brand equity, performance, profitability, and shareholder confidence. In contrast, organizations with strong, positive cultures inspire a feeling of ownership, shared commitment, and motivation in their employees – the attributes that are most useful when facing challenging market conditions.

And what of the other types of sexual predation? The person who presumes to grope you with his eyes; the acquaintance who keeps making lewd jokes, even though you don’t laugh along; the guy who insists on continuing to objectify women with the excuse that it's the natural inclination of men to notice what is beautiful about women (blech); the interviewer who won’t give you the time of day because you’re not physically attractive enough (to him); the person who comments on your weight (too skinny, too fat) as if weight is a measure of your worth – what about them? Is that discrimination? Is that sexual harassment?

In the legal sense, only if the behavior violates a person’s rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But come on. Do we really need legal frameworks to tell us it's wrong to treat people unequally or to make unwanted sexual advances? Here’s a guideline for the confused: You have no business making a sexual advance, sexual comment, or implying sexual interest in anyone, other than the person with whom you are already in a sexual relationship or unless you are on a date – specifically a date which has become hot and steamy due to mutual and enthusiastic interest in one another.

Here's another: You have no business valuing a person's job responsibilities or job performance based on looks, gender, or anything other than the actual responsibilities and performance.

These guidelines should be easy for everyone to follow.

What about the more subtle encroachments? For instance, is it OK to comment on a woman’s appearance? Well, start with the directive, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This applies to wives and girlfriends by the way. But what if you want to pay a compliment?

Start by asking yourself, “if this person were a man, would I compliment his appearance?” If the answer is “no,” then just stop already. Women are not here for your visual enjoyment, even though you may visually enjoy them. Keep it to yourself. But if you’re the kind of guy who is likely to say, “great necktie!” “Love the haircut!” or “I like your new shoes, where did you buy them?” Then it’s probably fine to say, “I like your jacket,” “great haircut,” or “purple is a terrific color for you.” Of course, only women who already know you would be aware that you make similar comments to men. Women who don’t know you may still be put off by your presumption to comment on their appearance.

Ultimately, our purpose with one another at the office, at trade shows, and at industry functions is to do business. Anything that causes another human to feel uncomfortable, unsafe, disrespected, confused, or ashamed interferes with the work, and anything that interferes with the work is a waste of time and resources and potentially damaging to our industry.  That’s the business reason to speak out against both abuses of power and inappropriate behavior.

Of course, there shouldn’t have to be a business reason, should there? Because it’s never OK to make someone else feel uncomfortable, disrespected, unsafe, confused, or ashamed.  It’s never OK to violate someone emotionally or physically. It’s never OK to be a jerk.

So why should we care about what is happening at Signet? Why should we care that women in our industry are regularly sharing personal stories of harassment that occurred at their offices and when attending trade events? It should matter to us because, as I said earlier, organizations that turn a blind eye to terrible behavior eventually suffer economically, and this is true for industries as well.

But mostly, it should matter to each of us on a personal level. It should matter what happens to other human beings.  Kindness, integrity, character, and respect should matter. Shouldn’t they?

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Ideas are a lot like zucchini. They tend to be prolific in production, but after a while you realize that a giant pile of zucchini isn’t all that useful (or appetizing). To get the full value out of a garden full of zucchini, you must use a recipe and transform them into something else — like zucchini bread, zucchini casserole, and my favorite - zucchini sushi.

To turn your giant pile of ideas into profits, you need project planning. Why? Because a project plan is the recipe that helps you define, manage, and complete the transformation of an idea into a new reality.

Thankfully, project planning isn’t that complicated. Oh, it can be – particularly given how people like to over-complicate things! But with an affordable project management software and some project management basics, you can become a project management guru. Read on to find out how.

Elements of a Project Plan

Purpose and Scope

Begin every project plan by defining its purpose and scope. This is important. Without purpose and scope, every person who hears about the project may have different expectations. Let’s use an example. If we created a project to select a project planning software, the purpose and scope would be essential to choosing the right tool.

For instance, some project planning tools are good for small projects, but not for large, detailed projects with many due dates and participants. Some project planning tools are good for only 5-10 people, and others are useful for large organizations.

Project Scope and Purpose A:

We need a project planning tool for our 7-person marketing team. We manage short-term projects, and the projects rarely exceed 1 level of task detail. We need this project plan to help us reduce our planning cycles and do a better job of hitting deadlines.

Project Scope and Purpose B:

We need a project planning tool for the 70 people in our head office. We manage large and small projects, and our most complicate projects can go to 2 or 3 levels of detail per task. We need to be able to include outside participants. We need this project plan to achieve strategic objectives, improve corporate communications, and create global transparency regarding our projects.

As you can probably see from those two descriptions, the project plans and software selections would be quite different from one another.

Create an Outline

The best way to start a project plan is to create an outline. This doesn’t have to be done in your project planning software. Sometimes, it is easiest to create the outline on a piece of paper, with lots of room to move things around, scratch things out, and develop good descriptions. For example, let’s use “Project Scope and Purpose B” from above.

We begin by asking, “what are the broad tasks that must be done to achieve the objectives of this project?” Your list may look like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
5. Shortlist and Test
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software

Are you done? No, but that is a good start. The next step is to create more detail in your project outline. It looks like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
   1. Operations Team project planning processes and tools
   2. Marketing Team project planning processes and tools
   3. Merchandising Team project planning processes and tools
   4. Sales Team project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
   1. Senior Executive/C-suite needs and wants
   2. Department Head needs and wants
   3. Team member needs and wants
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
   1. Develop list of known project planning software
   2. Request references and recommendations from business partners who use project planning software
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
   1. Using online information, develop preliminary description of each software
   2. Narrow list to 5 software packages to consider
5. Test Shortlist
   1. Contact vendors for product demonstrations or do online product demonstrations
   2. Document advantages and shortcomings of each software
   3. Review findings with representatives from each functional area
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software
   1. Create implementation plan and schedule (this is a mini-project — which would be created exactly the way we created the overall project plan).
   2. Follow the implementation plan

Assign Resources and Dates

The next step is to assign a point person for each aspect of the project plan. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who will do all the tasks themselves — they will likely be delegating many of the tasks, and keeping other tasks for themselves. But this person will be responsible to ensure that whomever is assigned the task is doing the task on time and correctly.

The date part is trickier. The way we set dates on a project plan depends a lot on the type of project plan; long-term or short-term. But let’s start with the way they’re both the same. Every project, large or small, must be assigned a completion date. This is the date at which we expect the entire project to be completed. Every other date assigned within the project must meet that overall due date. So, you can’t have an overall project due on October 15, 2019, but have a task within that project due on December 1, 2019.

Now let’s look at the way long-term projects and short-term projects are different.

For a short-term project, you will likely assign all the due dates at once. Many short term projects are repeated year after year (Valentine’s Day promotion, summer sale, Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Trade Show Plan). In those cases, the participants know the steps that need to be done and they launch and complete projects like this every single month. So assign due dates for each task at the same time you assign responsibilities.

For long-term projects, you set milestone dates at the outset, but save individual task dates until you are closer to working on those tasks. What is a milestone? Milestones are the significant stages or segments of a plan. The numbered items in the above list are the major segments of the project. The completion date for each group of tasks is a milestone.

For example, you would set the due date for the entire project. You may also set dates by when you want to accomplish the first level (milestone) tasks in your outline. But for the individual tasks within the outline, you may not set due dates or delegate responsibilities until you turn your attention to that task group. This is part of managing the project.

Once you have your project scope, outline, resources, and dates identified, it’s time to plug all that information into your project software.

Managing a Project

The best projects are inclusive, cross-functional, and heavy on communications.

With today’s Project Management tools, we pretty much have it made when it comes to project management, because this software category is well-defined and robust. Whether you use programs like Basecamp, Asana, or Trello for loosely structured projects and communication, or programs like Plutio, Zoho, Wrike, or Microsoft Project for highly structured projects and communication, all modern project management tools have a few common elements:

• The ability to create a list of tasks and assign due dates and people to them.
• The ability to create conversational “threads” on each task and on the overall project, which helps eliminate phone calls and email and creates better overall information sharing.
• The ability to track progress on the project plan, maintaining accountability and transparency.

Now back to due dates for a minute. In the long-term project plan, you may start out with due dates for the total project, and for the major groups of project tasks or significant time intervals, but few dates or assignments at the detailed task level of the project. That’s not only OK – that’s good.

In the not-so-distant past, project management software forced us to set dates for the entire project at the outset. But we all know that it can be hard to envision all the necessary detail for long-term projects. And once all those dates and details are set, we have to manage a lot of detail that may or may not be accurate or relevant – particularly as the project goes on.

The best way to set and manage accurate dates and responsibilities in a major project is one chunk at a time. The project team should meet weekly or bi-weekly. At those meetings, they should decide as a group which elements of the project to elevate next. Once decided, the project plan should be updated to reflect those dates. This method makes the project plan more accurate and meaningful, and it ensures that all project team members are focused on the right things at the right times.

The project team should also hold one-another accountable for due dates and results. If there’s no pressure within a project team to meet their responsibilities, the project will languish. A manager can certainly help to apply pressure, but case-study after case-study demonstrates that the best-executed projects benefit from peer group commitment and motivation.

Why Planning?

It may be difficult to imagine, but not everyone loves project planning equally (a bit of sarcasm here). Yet, there’s a huge benefit to project planning that turns all motivated professionals into raving fans.

As this graphic demonstrates, the cost of planning is lower than the cost of execution. So by spending more time in the planning phase, you can shorten the time you spend in execution phase and reduce your overall cost.

Because planning helps mitigate time-consuming execution errors, spending more time in planning also tends to speed up the entire project.

You can also improve the quality of the project with better planning. Well-planned projects experience better overall results than projects with little planning effort.

The message is clear. Professional project planning is more economical and effective, and ultimately of higher quality, than seat-of-the-pants project management. And considering the fabulous software tools available today, project planning is easier than ever.

So that’s your recipe! Now it’s time to sift through that giant pile of ideas you have, and start turning those ideas into profits, using a project management approach that is easy to implement and makes managing the project (the real work) more effective than winging it. You’ve be so excited at how much more you will accomplish this way.

Using Poka Yoke, you can eliminate most of those head-smacking, why-did-we-make-that-mistake process problems.

Let’s face it. Work is often full of busy-work, sometimes it’s monotonous, and there are occasionally days when you head for home and you realize that you just went through the motions all day long (hopefully, you don’t have a lot of those days). Many of the errors in the workplace occur when people are, well, spacing off a little! How can we account for the occasional human lack-of-attention? With a Lean method called Poka Yoke.

Poka Yoke means designing systems to prevent human error, and it can be implemented at any step in any process where errors are likely to be made. A few good examples of Poka Yoke everyone understands include:

Automobile Gas Caps

There are two Poka Yoke applications in most modern gas caps. First, there is a plastic cord that connects the gas cover to the automobile. This prevents those little caps from getting lost. Second, the hole for the gas tank (filling pipe insert) is sized to fit the filling handle of the proper type of fuel  (diesel, leaded, unleaded).

Saving Electricity

Most people remember to turn off lights, turn down the A/C, and otherwise save energy in their own homes. After all, electricity is expensive! But hotels have long known that people do not bring the same conservations to their travel accommodations. So, they poka-yoked a solution.

In many hotels around the world, the hotel room is equipped with a room key holder. If you put your room key in the holder, the lights go on! When you take your room key out and leave the room, the electricity is turned off. Simple solution that prevents the error of wasted energy!

Poka Yoke at Work

At its best, Poka Yoke is the elegant work of process ninjas, anticipating the most peripheral of problems and solving them in simple, elegant ways. But we all have to start somewhere, and we don’t need to be ninjas right away. So here are the three basic approaches of Poka Yoke, as defined by Shigeo Shingo of Lean fame.

• The Contact Method. This is the simplest approach. It is about taking a good look at a product or process and identifying its defects or faults.

• The Fixed Value Method. Also known as the “Constant Number” method, this method is used when there are a known number of steps that must be done to complete a process. If the person doing the process does not complete the full number of steps, they are alerted that they have missed a step. You encounter examples of the Fixed Value Method when you complete online forms. If you miss a required field, the system refuses to take your submission and highlights the fields that still require information.

• The Motion Step Method. Also known as the “Sequence Method,” this method is simply about making sure that the process was done correctly. When you document a process, and then use a checklist to ensure that each step of the process is completed, you are using the Motion Step Method.

How to Start Using Poka Yoke

You can break all Poka Yoke solutions down into two categories: prevention and detection.  Prevention devices keep a non-conformance from happening, and detection devices alert an operator that a non-conformance has occurred.

A good Poka Yoke device is always simple, and cheap. If they are too complicated, they are not cost-effective and they introduce the possibility of additional non-conformance. Poka Yoke devices should also be completely integrated into the process, and close to where the process occurs. Think about that online form again for a moment. When you complete an online form, you see indications of what fields are required. There may be an asterisk in the box, or the box may be outlined in a different color. This is what we mean by engineering the expectations into the process – the “prevention” form of Poka Yoke. Then, if someone skips a required field, the form may refuse to submit until the field is completed. This is the “detection” form of Poka Yoke. And each of these steps are completely integrated in the process, as well as simple, and cheap.

The 5 Stages of Poka Yoke

Step 1: Remember that everyone makes mistakes. So our job as managers is to create  systems where those mistakes can’t be made.

Any time I hear a senior executive complaining about how people should “just remember” not to make mistakes, I assume a certain lack of self-awareness. We all make mistakes. So the goal isn’t to stop being human, nor is it to only hire people with eidetic memories. People who accept this first concept become the most effective practitioners of Poka Yoke.

Step 2: Find the Root Cause. If we don’t find the root cause, we’ll end up focusing all our energy on symptoms, and implementing several – possibly competing - solutions where only one would do. If you want to learn more about Root Cause Analysis (RCA), check out this article on Root Cause Analysis.

Step 3: Think in terms of Standard Operating Procedures. Every procedure should have a standard operation, it should be documented, and the operators should be trained to it. As long as there is variance in a process, you can’t control for errors.

Step 4: Brainstorm “What Could Go Wrong” for Every Process. This is where the real work of Poka Yoke occurs. When you start thinking about what could go wrong, you start to anticipate – and prevent – the errors.

Step 5: Keep it Simple! When you come up with a way to error proof a process, challenge its complexity. The goal is to use extremely simple, dummy-proof solutions. If you introduce complex ideas, then you are also introducing more opportunities for human error!

Some of the most common Poka Yoke tools and techniques include:

• Checklists
• Form/Field Validations
• Vision Systems (visuals that reinforce the proper result or technique)
• Blocks, Barrier, and other Safety Features
• Counters
• Sensors
• Alarms
• Changes in Fixture Designs
• Changes in Die Designs

First You Solve the Process . . .

People problems are often process problems. What does that mean? It means that we humans are not endowed with perfect memories or perfect consistency. That’s why we must create processes that offset those human characteristics.

There is also a tremendous upside to this. We may not be perfectly consistent or have perfect memories, but we humans are wildly creative, and creativity is the ingredient that brings real value to a company. So, instead of spending our time solving problems and re-doing work, let’s make more time for being creative and bringing value! By using Poka Yoke, we introduce the possibility of more time for more innovation. And that’s exciting, because when we are innovating, the work is never dull, and we never feel the need to go on autopilot.

or . . . The Shin Bone's Connected to the Thigh Bone

Getting to the root cause of problems can speed up the solutions. Even better - it can keep those problems from spring up somewhere else!

It’s Monday. You’ve poured your first cup of office coffee, you’re sitting at your desk with the steaming mug in your hands, ready to face the week. You open your email and . . .

The email bomb. Your boss, demanding to know why production has stalled on your main product line. AGAIN. You sit there and sweat as your coffee goes cold and your week begins to look bleak.

Nothing is more upsetting – to bosses or managers – than problems that repeat themselves. The first time a problem occurs, reasonable people are accepting about it. After all, sh*t happens. But when problems reoccur, patience runs out. And it should, because errors are costly and keep us from focusing on creating new value for the company.

Typically, when the same problem occurs over and over again, it’s for one of these reasons:

1. The root cause was never identified, so each time we solve the problem we are actually only solving a symptom of the problem.
2. The root cause was identified, but we failed to do the 2^nd step of problem solving, which is error-proofing the process from that time forward.

Lean Manufacturing offers two excellent tools to avoid that Monday-morning, coffee-cooling, temper-raising situation. Root Cause Analysis, and Poka Yoke.

Root Cause Analysis

Root Cause Analysis (often called RCA in Lean) is one of the pillars of a quality system. A commitment to RCA can help a company quickly reduce errors and introduce more quality throughout its supply chain. There are four basic steps in RCA:

1. Collecting all the information about the problem (which we will refer to as a non-conformance). Every little detail – even the details that seem inconsequential!
2. Creating a visual map of the causal factors – the steps, missed steps, and errors that led to the non-conformance.
3. Accurately identifying the root cause or causes (sometimes there is more than one factor at the root – but rarely more than three).
4. Creating a solution that solves the root cause, and developing a corrective action plan.

Collecting the Information

5 Whys

The simplest way to collect information about the causes of a problem is to ask questions. But these questions should be structured as a true interrogative technique – and not just a random set of questions. In fact, when you ask questions in this way, it can be diagrammed.

To do a 5-Whys approach (and the result may be achieved in 3 Whys, or 10 Whys – the approach is named 5 Whys because the theory is that most root causes can be uncovered in 5 or less), start with the most obvious problem.

• We are scrapping a lot of engravings due to poor quality. Why?
• The patterns are too deep in some areas and too shallow in other areas. Why?
• The mirrors are not in perfect alignment. Why?
• We did not do proactive maintenance when we moved the engraver to a new workspace. Why?
• Nobody thought of it, because there is no process in place to ensure machines are maintained after being moved.

Solution: Any time an engraving machine is moved, there must be a process in place to ensure that maintenance is done. Further discussion of the topic would probably led the group to decide that the machine merited regular preventive maintenance – perhaps quarterly.

How do you diagram this?

Why Do You Need Visual Maps?

Before we go on to the next RCA tool, let’s talk about visual maps. Visual maps are an important element of problem solving. When we represent information in a visual manner, we engage more of our brains in understanding the issue. Visual maps require us to structure information, which helps us to better comprehend, synthesize, and remember the information, which leads to generating more and better new ideas. In other words, making mental information visual helps our brains do a better job!

Fishbone Diagram

Another very useful RCA tool is called the Fishbone Diagram (trivia: This was originally called an Ishikawa Diagram). This is sometimes referred to as a Cause-and-Effect Diagram. The Fishbone is more useful than 5 Whys when you are dealing with more complex problems. As you will see, it can take into consideration many more variables than the 5 Whys approach.

When you first look at a Fishbone Diagram, it may seem complicated. But it’s actually very simple!

As with the 5 Whys, you begin by asking, “what is the problem?” Then, you diagram it like this:

The next step is to categorize the causes. For example, missing customer deadlines can involve a lot of different areas, including:

• Sales Process
• Production Process
• Purchasing Process
• Warehouse (pick/pack/ship) Process

Place these different cause categories on the Fishbone Diagram like this:

Obviously, we don’t have enough detail yet to solve the problem. So the next step is to brainstorm the contributors to the problem. This part of the Fishbone will likely look like this:

The team should continue to brainstorm the problems, until all the possible causes have been identified. Very complex problems may go to several levels of hierarchy. You can use different shapes and colors for the different levels to make the diagram easier to read.

Once the diagram is complete, it will be much easier for the group to identify all root causes and brainstorm solutions for them.

 Conclusion

Getting to the root of problems is the only way to cure them. Consider the ramifications for your health. If you suddenly experience pain on the left side of your chest and numbness in your left arm, you don’t try to stretch it out or lay down and take a nap! You already know that these are signs of a heart attack, and you go straight to addressing the core issue (call 911!). You don’t spend time worrying about your sore arm. But what about medical emergencies you don’t already know about? The difference between a good medical outcome and a sad outcome is often based on getting to the right doctor who can quickly diagnose the core issue and treat it.

This is also important in business. Use these Lean tools to get to the root causes of problems. You’ll be solving another medical problem as well . . . the anxiety attacks that occur when you hear a dreaded problem has occurred again.

In next week’s Lean article we’ll discuss Poka Yoke, or how to make problems stay away.

This is the second of a two-part post. To read the first installation, click here.

I'm not suggesting collaboration is new - I'm suggesting we need more of it. Here are some examples of collaboration from which we can draw inspiration and fuel new ideas.

Ethical Metalsmiths

This group has existed for a long time, quietly gathering a membership in the hundreds. Like many small non-profits, it has suffered from diffusion of its mission. Recently, with a dynamic new board in place, the group has focused on its role in the larger universe of social justice, social responsibility, and environmental protection groups as one of collaboration. Rather than trying to be and do all the things that much larger (and better funded) organizations have tackled, the Ethical Metalsmiths group has decided on a collaborative approach.

Working as an advocate for its own membership, Ethical Metalsmiths will provide a framework to support its members on a journey of better practices. EM will reach out to organizations like Association for Responsible Mining and the Responsible Jewellery Council, and bring back practices and knowledge from them for the EM community. EM members sit on committees for the Jewelry Industry Summit, creating cross-pollination with other groups concerned about the same issues.

This approach will facilitate the growth of EM, and also helps promote the overall goal of sustainability and responsibility by spreading the love around through collaboration.

MJSA Collaborations

The MJSA (Manufacturing Jewelers and Suppliers of America) is always looking for ways to build collaborations among its members to better all the members. Their BEaJEWELER program* is a great example of this. BEaJEWELER seeks to entice new people to the profession of jewelry. It provides a website with extensive resources to direct interested visitors to schools, training programs, and information to help them make a good decision and set out on their path. BEaJEWELER also invites its jeweler members to share their own stories and insights, because it’s that human element that makes a career choice come alive. Of course, this benefits all of the participants, because we all know the struggle of finding qualified help in the jewelry production studio!

Now, MJSA is introducing a new initiative – the Studio Jeweler outreach program. Again, collaborating with members, MJSA will reach out directly to consumers to connect them with the satisfying experience of buying jewelry made locally and traditionally. Both MJSA initiatives are funded in part by a JCK Industry Grant – itself another form of collaboration.

ANZA Gems

Monica Stephenson, known by many in the jewelry industry for the long-running iDazzle blog, offers another example of powerful collaboration. After traveling to Africa as part of the team that participated in the making of the gem documentary Sharing the Rough, Monica became very committed to helping making a difference on the ground in artisanal mining communities. She started ANZA Gem. ANZA Gem takes gem rough from artisanal miners, collaborates with designers and consumers to make and sell finished jewelry, and returns a significant portion of that value back to the original mining community. This effort recognizes in practice what Sharing the Rough demonstrated in film: that the materials we take from the ground form a chain from the person who digs in the dirt for it to the person who ultimately wears it. Monica’s goal is to make sure every piece of that chain also benefits from it, and she chose collaboration as the way to do her part.

Endorsements and Influence

Before the term influencer came to mean a previously anonymous person with 50,000 social media followers, influencer marketing was also a form of collaboration (OK, in truth, it still is). When people with a following endorse specific products, theoretically the sales go up. This works best when it is apparent that the endorser clearly believes in the product and the exchange is not purely financial. So, athletes endorsing shoes they’ve been wearing all along (prior to the endorsement) have more influence than Cindy Lauper being paid to endorse a pharmaceutical.

Are there ways to create stronger collaboration of the influence sort? Sure there are – that’s exactly what social proof is. If you’re not using product reviews and testimonials from customers to persuade prospects, you’re not taking advantage of this potent source of marketing collaboration. And the collaboration isn’t just about you and your customers – it’s also peer collaboration, as consumers rely on friends, acquaintances, or just people who seem like them to give them advice regarding the products they are considering.

Co-Branding

Many retail jewelers have dabbled in collaborations with other local businesses. Most of the time, it doesn’t go beyond basic co-branding for a promotion or event. But what if it did? What if several businesses banded together to create an omnichannel experience for customers that went way beyond one store?

Big corporations can achieve the benefits of collaboration (more minds to tackle tricky problems) just by virtue of their employment pool. And even then, smart corporate leaders often look to collaborate with other corporations to gain competitive advantage. We are all self-limiting to some extent (if not inherently, at least practically), and the way to combat that is by inviting in the wisdom and experience of others. Small business owners need collaborations to compete.

The future of retail hasn’t been invented yet – it’s still being conceived of. The questions are: are you part of that conceptualization, or are you waiting for others to do it? Are you going it alone, or are you looking for the advantages that come from smart people putting their heads together? My money is on the outcomes of strong collaborations, and the smart people who decide to engage in them.