5. Why Are People Skills So
Important?
! New Ventures fail from
lack of customers !
• Not lack of product
• Translates to
– People make the product
– People buy the products
– People make the decisions
– People sign cheques
– People
• More info: http://steveblank.com/
6. Because Work is Emotional
The Startup Curve <<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/03/the-startup-curve.html
7. Johnny Bunko’s 6+ Lessons
1 There is no plan
[The economy changes too fast for your career to have a plan.]
2 Think strengths, not weaknesses
[Find your advantages]
3 It’s not about you
[Serving others serves you best]
4 Persistence trumps talent
[Keep showing up]
5 Make excellent mistakes
[Take risks, but fail forward]
6 Leave an imprint
[Do something that matters]
7Stay hungry
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/002898.php
http://www.johnnybunko.com/
9. Getting Ideas to Stick
• Let’s Listen to the
Introduction
• 5:50min
Communicating http://www.madetostick.com/
10. Curse Of Knowledge
• ―The Curse of Knowledge: when we are
given knowledge,
it is impossible to imagine what it's like
to LACK that knowledge.‖
Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and
Others Die
Communicating
11. Key Points
• Simple is about Prioritizing.
• Unexpected is about violating
• SUCCES schema/ ―norms‖
– Simple • Concrete is about
using sensory language
– Unexpected
• Credible is about
– Concrete human scale statistics
– Credible or vivid details
– Emotional • Emotional -
People care about people
– Stories (not numbers)
• Stories - drive action thru
simulation
Communicating
13. Listening
• Think Before You Speak
• Listen With Respect
• Ask Yourself - ―Is it Worth It?‖
• Make The Other Person Feel Important
– The Big Skill -
– Do they feel like they’re the only one that matters?
Listening
14. Tactics
• Listen • Maintain your end of the dialogue by
asking intelligent questions that
• Don’t Interrupt
– (a) show you're paying attention
• Don’t finish the other persons – (b) move the conversation forward
sentences – (c) require the other person to talk (
• Don’t say, ―I knew that.‖ while you listen )
• Don’t even agree with the other
person ( even if he praises you,
just say, "Thank you" ) • Eliminate any striving to impress the
other person with how smart, or
• Don't use the words "no", "but", funny, you are. Your only aim is to
or "however‖ let the other person feel he, or she,
• Don't be distracted. is accomplishing that.
• Don't let your eyes wander, or
attention wander, elsewhere
while the other person is talking
Listening
15. Paradox:
The more you subsume
your desire to shine, the
more you will shine in the
other person's eyes
Listening
17. This is Important because
• You’re serving (helping) your market.
• Boss / Employee relationship
– You’re serving ( helping ) your boss.
– You’re asking your subordinates for help.
Helping & Receiving Help is everywhere
18. Background
1. All societies are ―stratified‖
(Status matters )
2. All behavior is reciprocal
Helping
19. One Up & One Down
One ―Up-ness‖ of being asked to help
One ―Down-ness‖ of asking for help
At beginning –
helping relationship is ―unbalanced‖
Helping
20. Three Roles
1. Expert
( self diagnose and find expert )
2. Doctor
( diagnose & prescribe )
3. Process Consultant
(engage in humble inquiry )
Helping
21. Seven Principles of
Effective Helping
1. Giver & Receiver • Starts w/ Humble
are both ready Inquiry
2. Relationship is • Receiver owns the
equitable problem
3. Helper is in Proper • Helper never has all
Role the answers
4. Communication is
not a choice
Helping
22. This is why …
• You love being asked to help
– you don’t ask for help
• Jumping into most powerful role ―the
doctor‖ often (always) fails
– Why listening is so important (again)
Helping
23. Note How Traditional Techniques are ―Not Helping‖
CustomerCentricBehaviour
Traditional CustomerCentric
Make Presentations Converse ―Situationally‖
Offer Opinions Ask Relevant Questions
Focus On Relationships Focus On Solution
Gravitate Towards Users Target Business People
Rely on Product Relate Product Usage
Compete to Stay Busy Compete to Win
Close on Sellers Time Frame Close of Buyers Time Frame
Attempt to Sell By Empower Buyers to
• Convincing/Persuading •Achieve Goals
• Handling Objection • Solve Problems
• Overcoming Resistance • Satisfy Needs
24. The ―No Asshole Rule‖
• The Quiz
– http://electricpulp.co
m/guykawasaki/arse/
Behaviour
25. 20 Bad Habits
• Here is a list of 20 Bad Habits
• It is very useful to be able to describe them
• Unfortunately it is very difficult to assess
yourself.
Behaviour
26. Bad Habit 1-4
• 1. Winning too much:
The need to win at all costs and in all situations.
• 2. Adding too much value:
The overwhelming desire to add our 2 cents to every discussion.
• 3. Passing judgment:
The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
• 4. Making destructive comments:
The needless sarcasm and cutting remarks that we think make
us witty.
Behaviour
27. Bad Habits 5 - 8
• 5. Starting with NO, BUT, HOWEVER: The overuse
of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to
everyone that I’m right and you’re wrong.
• 6. Telling the world how smart we are: The need to
show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
• 7. Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility
as a management tool.
• 8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t
work”: The need to share our negative thoughts
even when we weren’t asked.
Behaviour
28. Bad Habits 9-20
• 9. Withholding information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over
others.
• 10. Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to give praise and reward.
• 11. Claiming credit that that we don’t deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution
to any success.
• 12. Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people
excuse us for it.
• 13. Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from
our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
• 14. Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
• 15. Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or
recognize how our actions affect others.
• 16. Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
• 17. Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners.
• 18. Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to
help us.
• 19. Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
• 20. An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.
Behaviour
32. Rules to Live By
• The company is a no-asshole zone. It requires employees to agree to sign this document
• Rules of Engagement
• 1. I will be passionate—about SuccessFactors’ mission, about my work. I will love what we do for companies and employees
everywhere.
• 2. I will demonstrate respect for the individual; I will be nice and listen to others, and respect myself. I will act with integrity and
professionalism.
• 3. I will do what it takes to get the job done, no matter what it takes, but within legal and ethical boundaries.
• 4. I know that this is a company, not a charity. I will not waste money—I will question every cost.
• 5. I will present an exhaustive list of solutions to problems—and suggest actionable recommendations.
• 6. I will help my colleagues and recognize the team when we win. I will never leave them behind when we lose.
• 7. I will constantly improve Kaizen! I will approach every day as an opportunity to do a better job, admitting to and learning from
my mistakes.
• 8. I will selflessly pursue customer success.
• 9. I will support the culture of meritocracy and pay for performance.
• 10. I will focus on results and winning—scoring points, not just gaining yardage.
• 11. I will be transparent. I will communicate clearly and be brutally honest, even when it’s difficult, because I trust my
colleagues.
• 12. I will always be in sales and drive customer satisfaction.
• 13. I will have fun at work and approach my work with enthusiasm.
• 14. I will be a good person to work with—I will not be an asshole.
• I agree to live these values. If my colleagues fail to live up to any of these rules, I will speak up and will help them correct; in turn,
I will be open to constructive criticism from my colleagues should I fail to live by these values. I understand that my performance
will be judged in part by how well I demonstrate these values in my daily work.
• http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/02/arse_the_asshho.html
Behaviour
33. Mindset
? What Do You Believe?
1. Your intelligence is something very basic
about you that you can’t change very much.
2. You can learn new things, but you can’t
really change how intelligent you are.
3. No matter how much intelligence you have,
you can always change it quite a bit.
4. You can always substantially change how
intelligent you are.
Attitude
34. -Brains grow like a
Muscle
- practice makes it
stronger!
- By extension
“Groups can grow their
intelligence”
Attitude
35. Let’s Listen To Vinod Khosla
• Persistence
• Getting into Stanford MBA School
– He didn’t get in the first time.
• Closing Sun’s first Deal
– Did he really sleep in the lobby?
• ~ 7:15
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla
• http://iinnovate.blogspot.com/2007/10/vinod-khosla-co-founder-of-sun.html
Attitude
36. Where R U Gonna Work?
• Skill set & Intent are radically different
• Think about your past Co-op term
experiences
• Think about where you may want to be
or what you need to experience.
37. Six Types of Startups
http://steveblank.com/2011/09/01/
why-governments-
don%E2%80%99t-get-startups/
37
38. ―Six Different Startup Types‖
• Lifestyle
• Small Business
• Scalable
• Buyable
• Large Company
• Social
38
39. LifeStyle
• Surf Shop
• Dive Shop
• Technology Shop
• A lifestyle entrepreneur is living the life
they love, works for no one but
themselves, while pursuing their
personal passion.
39
40. Small Business
• 5.7 M in US
• 99.7% of all companies
• 50% of all non-governmental workers
• Most barely profitable
40
41. Scalable
• Google, Skype, Facebook, Twitter
• Founders believe ―Gonna Change the
World‖ .
• Their job is to search for a repeatable
and scalable business model.
• ―4 Steps to Epiphany
is about this‖
41
42. Buyable
• Goal … develop business for acquisition
by larger companies
42
43. Large Company
• Build or Acquire?
• Big Companies
+ win with incremental innovation
- at a disadvantage in new markets
43
44. Social
• Their goal is to make the world a better
place
• Non-profit, for-profit, or hybrid.
44
45. 6 Startups
• Lifestyle {Work to Live Their Passion}
• Small Business {Work to Feed Family}
• Scalable {Born to be Big}
• Buyable {Born to Flip}
• Large Company {Innovate or Evaporate}
• Social – {Driven to Make a Difference}
45
Editor's Notes
One explanation for executives’ love affair with vague strategy statements relates to a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. Top executives have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads. But frontline employees, who aren’t privy to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. As a result, the strategies being touted don’t stick.Leaders can thwart the curse of knowledge by “translating” their strategies into concrete language.Stories, too, work particularly well in dodging the curse of knowledge, because they force us to use concrete language.Concrete language and stories defeat the curse of knowledge and make executives’ strategy statements stickier. As a result, all the members of an organization can share an un- derstanding of the strategies and a language for discussing them.
1 & 2 Are fixed mindset3 & 4 are growth
Lifestyle Startups: Work to Live their PassionOn the California coast where I live, we see lifestyle entrepreneurs like surfers and divers who own small surf or dive shop or teach surfing and diving lessons to pay the bills so they can surf and dive some more. A lifestyle entrepreneur is living the life they love, works for no one but themselves, while pursuing their personal passion. In Silicon Valley the equivalent is the journeyman coder or web designer who loves the technology, and takes coding and U/I jobs because it’s a passion.
Small Business Startups: Work to Feed the FamilyToday, the overwhelming number of entrepreneurs and startups in the United States are still small businesses. There are 5.7 million small businesses in the U.S. They make up 99.7% of all companies and employ 50% of all non-governmental workers.Small businesses are grocery stores, hairdressers, consultants, travel agents, Internet commerce storefronts, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. They are anyone who runs his/her own business.They work as hard as any Silicon Valley entrepreneur. They hire local employees or family. Most are barely profitable. Small business entrepreneurship is not designed for scale, the owners want to own their own business and “feed the family.” The only capital available to them is their own savings, bank and small business loans and what they can borrow from relatives. Small business entrepreneurs don’t become billionaires and (not coincidentally) don’t make many appearances on magazine covers. But in sheer numbers, they are infinitely more representative of “entrepreneurship” than entrepreneurs in other categories—and their enterprises create local jobs.
Scalable Startups: Born to Be BigScalable startups are what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their venture investors aspire to build. Google, Skype, Facebook, Twitter are just the latest examples. From day one, the founders believe that their vision can change the world. Unlike small business entrepreneurs, their interest is not in earning a living but rather in creating equity in a company that eventually will become publicly traded or acquired, generating a multi-million-dollar payoff.Scalable startups require risk capital to fund their search for a business model, and they attract investment from equally crazy financial investors – venture capitalists. They hire the best and the brightest. Their job is to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. When they find it, their focus on scale requires even more venture capital to fuel rapid expansion.Scalable startups tend to group together in innovation clusters (Silicon Valley, Shanghai, New York, Boston, Israel, etc.) They make up a small percentage of the six types of startups, but because of the outsize returns, attract all the risk capital (and press.)Just in the last few years we’ve come to see that we had been building scalable startups inefficiently. Investors (and educators) treated startups as smaller versions of large companies. We now understand that’s just not true. While large companies execute known business models, startups are temporary organizations designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.This insight has begun to change how we teach entrepreneurship, incubate startups and fund them.
In the last five years, web and mobile app startups that are founded to be sold to larger companies have become popular. The plummeting cost required to build a product, the radically reduced time to bring a product to market and the availability of angel capital willing to invest less than a traditional VCs– $100K – $1M versus $4M on up – has allowed these companies to proliferate – and their investors to make money. Their goal is not to build a billion dollar business, but to be sold to a larger company for $5-$50M.
Large companies have finite life cycles. And over the last decade those cycles have grown shorter. Most grow through sustaining innovation, offering new products that are variants around their core products. Changes in customer tastes, new technologies, legislation, new competitors, etc. can create pressure for more disruptive innovation – requiring large companies to create entirely new products sold to new customers in new markets. (i.e. Google and Android.) Existing companies do this by either acquiring innovative companies (see Buyable Startups above) or attempting to build a disruptive product internally. Ironically, large company size and culture make disruptive innovation extremely difficult to execute.
Social entrepreneurs are no less ambitious, passionate, or driven to make an impact than any other type of founder. But unlike scalable startups, their goal is to make the world a better place, not to take market share or to create to wealth for the founders. They may be organized as a nonprofit, a for-profit, or hybrid.
