Steve Neiderhauser

Analogies used for Descriptions

Several years ago, I bought a little blue book from Amazon called, The Analogy Book of Related Words. Unfortunately, it now looks like the book is only available from third parties.

When beginning to write a description, thinking of analogies or metaphors will help you paint a fresh, vivid portrait of your scene. Just flipping through the different categories in the book — from Acting to Zodiac — will help you think of your writing in the light of analogies. Who knows what clichés you will avoid, and what words of delight you will create.

Let's look at an example from the book:

His face was etched with the erosion of many years. Gray had almost overtaken his copper hair... Even before he spoke you sensed this was a man of iron. When he began to address the crowd, he words were as hot and flowing as molten lava.

Hold the Interview

Dan Heath and Chip Heath provide evidence in this Fast Company article that the interview process may not find the most qualified people for your company.

Instead, the past performance of a person is the best indicator of future performance. Asking a person to perform a job test and demonstrate his skills helps discover the true stars.

As a person interviewing for a job, you can't count on the company to always give you the opportunity to demonstrate your skills. So I suggest you do what many graphic artists do — Start to build a portfolio of your accomplishments. Lead the high-profile projects in your company and then create a visual of your success. This could be a graph of the costs you cut for the next 12 months or the revenue you generated over the next year. You could also draw a Venn diagram to show how the intersection of your skills creates a distinct advantage for your new employer.

And when you're in the interview, go into demo mode at your first opportunity. Treat the interview as a consulting opportunity and show the hiring company how new technologies or a new marketing plan will drive customers to its doorstep.

The Spaces Create the Attraction

It's been said, "The spaces between the notes create the music." The same can be said of great designs. In Matthew May’s wonderful book, In Pursuit of Elegance, he describes how spaces can be used in design and seduction.

"Seductive ideas rest on our ability to spark the kind of intrigue that will keep the imagination engaged."

Market research studies show that people like a product less when they know too much about it. This is labeled as the "Blissful Ignorance Effect." The research showed that consumers like a product better when there’s a moderate knowledge gap. The researchers identified three parts of seduction:

Arouse curiosity by demonstrating a moderate gap in the observer’s knowledge.

Provide enough information to make them want to resolve their curiosity.

Give them time to resolve their curiosity on their own.

Mr. May writes that the three parts of seduction all boils down to playing hard to get. So it’s interesting to notice that Elegant Design concepts can be applied to persuasion, design, and dating. That’s right, I did say dating. When a guy goes on that first date, he may have a tendency to talk to impress — Leaving nothing to the imagination, he describes his car, his job, and even his take-home pay.

Seduction by reduction can be a lot more effective. Describe a little about yourself and leave a lot to her imagination. Be mysterious. Let her fill in the spaces. Her imagination will attribute sterling qualities to you that you would have never thought of.

Of course, we’ve all had first dates with a potential employer, and our persuasion skills determined if we were able to attract that dream job.

Your persuasion skills are magnified when you arouse curiosity by demonstrating a gap in knowledge. Many managers resist great ideas even if the idea is a no brainer. So persuading people as though they were persuaded not, increases the odds of your idea being embraced.

This demo story shows how creating a space and an engaging experience, attracted managers to an idea they soon caressed and cared for as if it were their own.

Magnify the Map

From Annette Simmons' Territorial Games comes this inspiring story:

During World War II, destroyers had a maximum speed of 20 knots — except for one destroyer commanded by Admiral Arleigh Burke. Burke's destroyer sped 5 knots over the maximum limit. There was much speculation about how his engine room squeezed out 5 more knots.

While the topside crew could see planes fighting, hear artillery and experience the battle with all 5 senses, the engine room staff could see nothing and felt left out of the action. To remedy this, Admiral Burke wired the ship with a PA system that broadcast a blow-by-blow sports cast of everything that happened topside, complete with live sound effects. Now, requests for more power were met with added vigor, because the men understood why more speed was needed and felt part of the action.

In business, we can use the concept of making the map larger by including feedback that touches the five senses or magnifies the map. In software development, for example, you could magnify the project schedule by creating a milestone schedule, a schedule that shows only the key milestones.

I did this for one project and added a twist by printing the milestone schedule on extra large paper and taping the printout to a common wall. This made it a breeze for managers and developers to see at a glance the state of the project.

Tip: Use the milestone schedule for stakeholder meetings. Pay special attention to missed milestones, for those missed dates may mean the project is at risk.

The Imagination Economy

Last week, I received Ann Miller's newsletter. You gotta admire anyone today who is spreading a positive message, a message about taking control of your business and its future. Ann provided several examples of applied imagination that generated new business.

One customer succeeded by reversing her premise. Instead of selling Muncie as a solid, but second-tier convention site, she catapulted it into first place by calling it the un-Chicago site.

Ann also identified what I call the building blocks of creativity:

Substitute

Combine

Adapt

Maximize / Minimize

Put to another use

Eliminate

Reverse premise

Multiplication is another technique. How do you apply multiplication to product design? Intel did this when they created the Intel duo and quad core processor. Intel took one CPU and multiplied it to greater benefits.

When you read Applied Imagination, you'll see all the building blocks applied to creative solutions. You'll read and see how Walt Disney used multiplication: In a movie short he showed one violinist playing five violins at once, and then five violinists playing one violin.

When you tap into the creative source and are in the flow of the creative process, fears will be pushed aside and the window of opportunity will be opened wide.

So forget about the evening news and Katie Couric's baby blues. Turn your gaze to your gorgeous imagination — For the acts of your imagination is the only script you'll need to direct your movie of success.

In Pursuit of Elegance

In this blog post, Guy Kawasaki refers to an interview he did with Matt May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance.

I haven't read his book, although after reading the interview here is my main thought: Much of what Matt talks about relates directly to screenwriting or story concepts. It's the gap, or the subtext in your product that creates curiosity and engages people in your product and your story.

In Dialogue techniques, the pull and power of implied dialogue is described. These story concepts — the ones that create subtext and engage your audience — can be applied directly to new product development.

Writing a screenplay or novel is one of the most challenging endeavors I can imagine. So if you are able to write or understand story concepts at an artistic level, you should be able to apply story concepts to products at the same artist level.

Let's look at one of the answers that Matt gave Guy in the interview.

How do you define elegance?

Answer: Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.

Subtraction is one of the building blocks of creativity. By subtracting the right elements you're able to engage the audience. We talked about this concept in Stories in Interviews — To keep the audience interested and curious... imply information, leave a gap so the audience is engaged in the story.

By the way, Matt's definition of elegance (unusually simple and surprisingly powerful) is Apple Computer's value proposition for its desktop computers. A supercomputer wrapped in an easy-to-use interface.

Blend Artistry with Engineering

In this interview stored on YouTube, Steve Jobs talks about the importance of having people on your team with a blend of artistic and engineering talent.

Part of what made the Macintosh great is that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists... who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Apple's latest version of GarageBand tells us the company is interested in nurturing new musicians. The software provides piano or guitar lessons, and makes online music lessons easy. Guitar lessons are taught by artists such as Sting, Colbie Caillat, and John Fogerty. I've taken a couple of the guitar lessons, and I can tell you it's much more enjoyable to learn music this way than through a chord book.

How does music amplify your talent? The basis of music is playing patterns and applying patterns in varying combinations. Also called — Creativity.

As you practice guitar or piano, you work with basic patterns (chords, for example) that you are constantly substituting, combining, or magnifying to produce new works of art. When we master the fundamentals of our imagination, we get a vision that our myopic friends are unable to see or dream of.

"Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals."
— Quote from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Anything can be Prototyped

The metacool blog describes how anything can be prototyped, and provides this sage advice:

A wise person operates with the worldview that anything can be prototyped, and we can prototype with anything.

If Steve McQueen can prototype his movie Le Mans, we can surely prototype services, customer experiences, and business models.

There are limitless benefits to prototypes, including the ability to expose the limits we have attached to ourselves, our products, and our customers.

How to Think Like Leonardo....

Di Caprio? Nope. I'm talking about Da Vinci, of course.

In How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb suggests that we follow Da Vinci's example and cultivate ambidexterity:

When Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel, he astounded observers by switching his paintbrush from one hand to the other as he worked. Leonardo, a natural left-hander, cultivated this same ambidexterity and regularly switched hands when working on The Last Supper and other masterpieces. When I interviewed Professor Raymond Dart and asked him for his recommendations on the development of human potential, he responded, "Balance the body, balance the brain. The future lies with the ambidextrous human!"

In business, it's important to hire ambidextrous employees — people who have business and technology skills. For they can imagine the future. If you don't employ multi-talented professionals, you lose out on business oportunities that cannot be imagined by the linear worker.

Back to Leonardo. The artist not the actor. While reading Gelb's book I chanced upon the enchanting story of Leonardo's unfinished horse.

Leonardo was commissioned to build a 24-foot bronze horse by the Duke of Sforza. Alas, the Horse was not to be. After much work, Leonardo completed a clay model, and the Horse was ready for casting. France invaded Milan, however, and French archers used the clay horse for target practice, reducing it to a clump of clay. It's said that Leonardo never got over the destruction of the Horse.

After reading an article in National Geographic entitled "The Horse That Never Was," Charles Dent was inspired to start a foundation to finish the horse.

Ironically, Dent died when the Horse was in the same stage of production (model completed and acclaimed, but not yet cast) as when it was destroyed by the French archers.

Before he died, the foundation promised Dent that The Horse would be completed.

On September 10, 1999, 500 years from the day the original model was destroyed, the dream became reality. Il Cavallo — The Statue of Liberty for Creativity — was reborn in Milan as a tribute to the da Vincian love of truth and beauty.

When a renaissance man's dream gallops through the mist of time and takes center stage in Milan, you know that ambidextrous men and women hold power in their hands.

An American Horse was also cast.

Note: I wrote this post four years ago. Now, in a world where change and uncertainty are accelerating, the ability to see patterns and make your vision come true are more relevant and powerful than ever.

Stories in Interviews

Have you ever felt that potential employers really didn’t sit up and take notice of your skills? How do you stand out in a crowd of resumes? In a CIO.com article, career consultant Katharine Hansen tells us that story provides the answer.

Story-telling, when done right, reveals a job seeker's personality, makes him or her more memorable, and helps a job seeker establish an emotional connection with hiring managers.

The article goes on to provide a structure for creating your interview story. Although, I do want to point out that when telling your story you should never say directly that you are a great marketer or amazing software developer. Instead, that bit of wisdom is hidden in the story.

I know, it seems natural that we use the story to tell the interviewer, “I did this and I did that.” There’s a problem with this approach. She’s already heard this tale of talent a hundred times, and it bores her because she is not actively involved in the story.

Screenwriters are faced with this issue on many levels: Dialogue, providing information about characters, and the message of the story. To keep the audience interested and curious, screenwriters often imply information, leaving a gap so the audience is engaged in the story.

Instead of looking into the camera and saying, “I am very smart,” tell a story that implies your brilliance through the actions of the story. This method allows the interviewer to actively participate in your story, discover your message, and have the message stick with her.

Creating a compelling story does more than telegraph the fact that you have good communication skills. It implies that you have a certain level of design talent... that you understand how to apply design to words.

"Fifteen years ago companies competed on price. Today it's quality. Tomorrow, it's design. No doubt about it, tomorrow has arrived."
— Professor Robert Hayes, Harvard Business School

Here’s a final tip. When you finish the story, be silent. Why rattle on about your story. Let the listener absorb the hidden meaning. To see how the pros in Hollywood pitch a story, read this Blake Snyder post – Watch our words.

Intangible skills that drive success

James Brown pens an article about three intangible skills that make you successful. Sometimes you can follow all the rules and processes and still find a project on the brink of failure. Without the intangible skills you may find yourself overwhelmed by a project and working long hours, long hours that do nothing but drain your energy.

Let's focus on the third skill he discusses: Adaptation — The ability to respond positively to unfavorable decisions and unfortunate circumstances.

One way to improve your ability to adapt to circumstances is to develop personal skills or product features that are flexible and respond to change. Like a screenwriter who knows how to plant and pay off story plot points, you should anticipate what career seeds to plant so they pay off later when you need to respond to changing plots.

How to move your story forward with reversals

The New Yorker has an essay about screenwriter Tony Gilroy
and how he surprises and enthralls jaded moviegoers with reversals.

Mr. Gilroy says, "A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested." Karl Iglesias provides another take in his book. He writes, "A reversal is a change from one situation to its opposite, like going from rich to poor, happy to sad..." Karl cites a classic example of a reversal in Casablanca:

When Louis says, "Round up the usual suspects," after Rick has shot Major Strasser. It reverses our expectation that Louis will arrest him.

Reversals keep your story fresh and the audience guessing.

Perhaps you're asking, How can these concepts be used in business? The New Yorker essay and Mr. Gilroy's work as a script doctor provides the clue. A studio has a project. Someone has written a script, but it's not working as expected, so we have a reversal. Mr. Gilroy comes in and fixes the script, the movie becomes a hit. Another reversal.

The same often happens in business. We see a project fail, there's a reversal of fortune, and business consultants are brought in to save the project.

Just like in stories, reversals can be a positive in business. How can a reversal be positive for your business? If you consistently deliver services, your customers may become like jaded moviegoers. Nothing ever goes wrong (shipments are always on time, the products always work) so customers start to take you for granted. If you were to have a problem with one of your products for a customer, this gives you the opportunity to spring to action, reverse the problem, and make a lasting impression on your customer. Unlike stories, ratcheting up reversals to greater heights of excitement will likely send your customers looking for a new director.

There is one other key point. Managers should build options into their products from the ground up so they have the flexibility to respond to reversals. Screenwriting provides another concept managers can learn from: You have to plant seeds early in the story so they pay off later. Let’s consider Casablanca again. In the opening scene, Louis has a line that refers to “rounding up twice the usual number of suspects.” This line helps set up, then pay off the reversal at the end of the movie.

The same is true with the letters of transit that allow Laszlo and and Ilsa to fly away and escape. The letters are talked about early in the movie. If the letters had been pulled from thin air at the end of the movie, it would have felt like an act of the gods and cheated the audience.

Business executives should understand this concept, because when a challenge occurs, those companies that have planted options and can improv will be able to move their companies forward through reversals.

On The Page

Pilar Alessandra teaches screenwriting. What's so special about her class? In Six Steps to a Screenplay she gives you six steps in six weeks to get your story out of your head and on the page. Here's three of her six steps:

Step 1: Idea Brainstorming

Step 2: Story Outlining

Step 3: Scene Crafting

Even if you're just a business person who is seeking ways to be more creative or following the career advice of Dan Pink to study story, I think you can see how mastering just the first three steps will make you more profitable.

And if the only thing Pilar's class did was help you produce one brilliant business idea, that would be worth it, wouldn't it? I'm taking her Weekly Workbook class — When I discover story patterns that can be applied to business I will draw the connection between business and story, and post an update to this blog.

Are you a Project Artist

Jack Duggal asks, "Are you a project artist?"

Instead of working within a rigid methodology, an artist works within a management framework. What are some of benefits the project artist brings to the venue? Take a look:

Better prepared to deal with the changes and variability of project environments.

Design the project with a creative eye, with a built-in flexibility to rearrange the project plan based on emerging stakeholder needs.

Constantly ask “what if,” challenge the rules, and substitute or combine project elements to create a robust project plan.

Ultimately, the artist must be skilled in the areas of analysis and design, to bring his masterpiece to market.

How to improve your visual design skills

Seth Godin tells us there are ways to sharpen your design skills and provides a list of resources.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Catchy title — Island of the Sequined Love Nun.

The story opening, by Christopher Moore, is even more captivating. Be careful when you read the first paragraph because you may get hooked and buy the book.

What can we learn from successful, entertaining authors like Mr. Moore and apply to business? When you script your next presentation, skip your company phone number, address, and history like a flat rock. Who cares about that stuff? Instead, start in mid-scene... mid-problem. Capture your audience's curiosity with the very first slide, and enthrall them for the rest of the ride.

Your company information could be thought of as story subtext. If you produce a thrilling presentation, they will ask for your name, phone number — and social security number. Smart marketers, like Izze beverage, leave a space when they create an event so customers discover its product.

Kare Anderson tells me that Leverage is an example of a TV show that opens in the middle of a scene. I've watched one of the openings — it grabbed my attention by the shirt collar.

Just-in-time learning

In Leonard Berry's wonderful book, On Great Service, he explores the importance of practice. Just as in sports where athletes are expected to practice to stay on top of their game, business people need to practice to keep their skills sharp.

In a case story, Coca-Cola mounted a massive training program. Initially, the program seemed a success, but three years later a checkup showed the employees had forgotten almost everything — They never had the opportunity to practice their newfound skills. This assessment drove Coca-Cola to "just-in-time" training where skills such as brainstorming and consensus building were taught.

If you are the kind of person who believes in a creative training approach you may want to look into improvisation training like that provided by BATS Improv in San Francisco. How would improv help you in business?

We live in a world where the rate of change is accelerating every day. People who have absorbed the structure of improv and think on their feet will succeed, where inflexible, brittle minds will crumble.