Startupfest 2014 - "You chose to start a company (or embark on an endeavor). You are passionate about your idea. But often this same passion makes us deaf. We hear feedback, but don’t listen. We miss opportunities to make our product and company better and sometimes we miss the opportunity to succeed. Your ability to listen to information you are hearing is critical to building a company (or project or product) to last.
That said, it is hard. Hard to hear things as they are, not as we are. But as JFK said regarding the US choice to go to the moon “…that goal [in our case listening] will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” My goal with this talk is to give you 5 tips and techniques to take your hearing to listening; your listening to learning; your learning to winning.
Why should you listen to me? I’m a start-up person that’s been lucky enough to have a number of battle wounds and wins to share from helping build companies and ideas with some amazing teams: PTCG (logistics software, sold to American Airlines); Lycos (went public); Apps.com (online applications, sold to Intuit); Spreadshirt (ecommerce, 3x growth in 4 yrs) and Basis Technology (internationalization, re-positioned responding to market conditions); and Intuit’s Innovation Lab (founder) and Quickbase ($1mm to $10mm in 3.5 yrs). My biggest learning is that listening is the most critical and most underused tool that we have."
3. How bad is our listening problem?
• 2.5% correct for listeners
• 25% retention @ 48h
• My estimate: 5-10% “right”
4. Listening can save your life
http://blog.startupcompass.co:
• 90%+ fail
• 74% due to premature
scaling
Listening #1 for discovery
& validation & efficiency
5. Listening
• produces success in business (Covey,
1989)
• minimizes the damaging aspects of
performance appraisals (Kluger & Nir,
2010)
• increases sales (Drollinger, Comer, &
Warrington, 2006)
• highly correlates with perception of
leadership (Allen, 2010; Bechler &
Johnson, 1995; Kramer, 1997)
• highly correlates with job-satisfactionLife is better
listening
10. Human curiosity,
the urge to know,
is a powerful force and is
perhaps the
best secret weapon
of all in the struggle to
unravel the workings of
the natural world.
Aaron Krug
15. Exercise #4: the HONY
Step 1: It isn’t the
words, it’s the energy
Step 2: Realize your
approach
Step 3: Explain your
goal
Step 4: Broad
questions, slowly
escalating
19. Exercise summary
1. Curiosity State: primed to learn
2. 2 ears, 1 mouth (or ear jacks):
guidelines, not constraints
3. Ear sits: clear your mind
4. The HONY: set the stage
5. Pen beats keyboard: write it out
6. Cheetah: be responsive
7. Boomerang: bring your mind back
23. Now, go off and set records!
Your coach:
jana@janaeggers.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
Tapping test: Listeners right 2.5% of the time
Information retention: 75% lost in 48 hours
Jana’s experience: 1-10% is about right
vs. 50% of all startups
Change or Die slide
As you can see, “you can do this”
William Duncan Vandiver, house, early 20th century.
I am from a state that raises cornand cotton and cockleburs and Democrats,and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisifies me. I am from Missouri.
You have got to show me.
Study your customer, and go in w/ a curious mind
SOFUS: interplay, decency, foresight, challenge, profit for Fiberline Composites, Denmark
Nervousness is a bad energy
Remind them no right or wrong answer… just what they do
Factual and conceptual
Speak at 125 words per minute
Understand speech at 400 words per minute
>2/3rds of our mental capacity goes off to play
Hunger, phone, other notes, spot on your shirt
The top three reported listening barriers for business practitioners were identified as 1)Environmental distractions such as phones ringing and other people talking, 2) Personal and internal distractions, such as hunger, headache, or preoccupation with something else, and 3)Rebuttal tendency – developing a counter argument while the speaker is still speaking (Watson & Smeltzer, 1984).