Steve Neiderhauser

Slow down to speed up learning

Recently, I've been studying techniques to shorten the time it takes to learn guitar. Let’s look at two practice tips.

1. To become fluent in the language of guitar, practice your guitar in 15 – 20 minute blocks several times a day. Much like a person learning a foreign language, the key is to be enthralled with learning so much that you want to practice every day. So instead of playing guitar for two hours on a Thursday, it’s more effective to play every day of the week for shorter periods of time.

2. Practice groups of notes or chords slowly. Suppose you’re having difficulty playing a string of notes. You may forget the order of the notes or your index finger may lapse into coma when it should land on C sharp. When these mistakes happen we often speed up to get past the trouble spots, and inadvertently learn bad habits. Instead, slow down to speed up your learning of a piece of music. Practice slowly so you are able to break down the steps and increase your ability to remember the next note. Slow practice also makes material seem easier, boosting your confidence for that all important performance.

How can we apply these learning concepts in business? There are skills in business that require practice to master. What if you were giving a presentation that could win your company a million dollar contract. Of course, senior management will want you to prepare for this presentation.

Rather than speeding through the words to avoid mistakes, slow practice your presentation to see how all the pieces fit together and to feel confident telling your story.

Kare Anderson provides a comfortable way to learn faster that dovetails with the above techniques.

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.

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.

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.

Stories that Grab and Hold your Audience

The more I learn about writing stories, the more I realize just how many ways story concepts can be applied to business. Last month I completed Tom Sawyer's class — Storytelling: How To Write Stories That Will Grab And Hold Your Audience.

Most of the concepts covered in class can be found in Tom's book, Fiction Writing Demystified. Although, in Tom's class you receive his insightful feedback and encouragement to take your writing to the next level.

Most business executives are unconscious to this story truth — The experiences you create, trump the stories you tell. More on that later...

So how can story concepts awaken you and sharpen your business skills? Let’s take a look:

Creativity: Tom describes several plot devices: Clock (a deadline), McGuffin (object of great value), the Penny-Drop (moment of realization, usually for a detective). There’s also the Meet-Cute (boy meets girl in a cute way) along with other design patterns. In business you are applauded for using clichés (best practices). Let’s imagine you are a software designer who uses the model-view-controller design pattern for a software product. If you spend an additional three weeks putting a special twist on the pattern so it’s not the same ol’ dull design, is your boss going to promote you? Not likely. And yet, that’s what writer’s are expected to do. Avoid the clichés.

In the meet-cute plot device, the writer should be familiar with most of the meet-cute scenes in other stories so he can put a special spin on his scene. A scene that’s fresh and invites curiousity. Give me the same thing, only different. A challenging way to think, still it keeps your creative edge sharp and quick.

Creating Customer Experiences: The creative sword you carry now helps you look at customer experiences through the eyes of story. You work at an artistic level. Using story concepts, you create positive customer surprises and recover from reversals (for example, the product that disappointed your largest customer).

In one of Tom’s class exercises, I wrote about a character — She’s a brilliant investment banker. Although, in the draft of my story she was unable to see through an investment scam run by a con artist. Well, if you were watching this movie you would probably say to yourself, “That doesn’t make sense. She should see through this. I can.” Movies create a fictional world. If you’re lucky — or talented enough — to grab an audience’s attention, avoid introducing incongruent elements that wrest your viewers from the fictional world you’ve created. When someone is ripped from a glorious fictional world, it’s like listening to a beautiful song on a vinyl record, only to hear the record player’s needle screech across the record.

Back to the principle I mentioned at the start — The experiences you create, trump the stories you tell.

Three months ago I bought a web-based class from a project management company. The company is still trying to figure out how to deliver the class on a web server. If you can’t stand up a web server in a couple days, you probably shouldn’t be in the business. Here’s the truly incongruent part. I’ve seen the president of the company give speeches to hundreds of people about the importance of being agile and responding to change. Can you hear the fictional world this guy built screeching to a halt and the music stopping?

It takes thousands of hours to hone your presentation skills and ideas to the point people want to listen to you. Protect your investment. Make sure the experiences you create match the stories you tell.

Let's get to it - Strong verbs

In this Act Zero post, Blake Snyder coaches a fellow screenwriter to get to the story. One of his tips is good for any kind of writing:

"Tell me a story" means fewer adjectives and adverbs and more verbs and nouns. Verbs are especially good.

How to avoid Clichés

The other day a coworker called me on the speaker phone and said, "We were just talking about you. Are your ears burning?"

I replied, "My ears are sizzlin'."

The people on the call laughed and giggled. Why? Because I took a cliché, its corners of meaning rounded and smoothed through decades of use, and gave it an edge. An unexpected twist.

I remember seeing Stephen King write in one of his books, "The smooch of death." What caused Stephen to skip the stock phrase, "Kiss of death"?

He understands that clichés are the kiss of death when trying to arrest your audience's attention.

The Entertainment Dimension

While many business managers believe they sell software or siding or swing sets or whatever they make, what they really sell is a customer experience. Their products are simply the table stakes to the game of business. So these managers would do well to consider how artists or writers design their products.

They could start by reading the interview of Debby Applegate in the January issue of the Writer. You see, Debby won a Pulitzer Prize for her book: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. The educational part for business people is that she studied and applied the formulas for suspense writing to her nonfiction work to keep her readers engaged page after page.

She read all the books on how to write thrillers and mysteries. In the end her goal distilled to one thing:

"Can I make you turn the page? And that is everything. Every single page, every single paragraph, I would ask myself: What do I have to write to make you read the next paragraph? ...I really wrote the book according to the formulas of the suspense genres."

Although, there was one book that she relied upon to make the ink on the page move her readers — Conflict, Action and Suspense by William Noble. She found one of the techniques in this book so effective, she still uses it all the time.

Debby sets an example for writers and managers. With all diligence, learn to use artistic techniques to enhance your work of nonfiction by adding an entertainment dimension.

The day of the specialist is dead — Long live the renaissance man.

Parallel Structures in Writing

Bonnie Trenga describes how to develop the skills to create parallelism in your writing. Parallel structures make it easier to read your prose and also provide an element of influence. Consider JFK's famous inauguration speech.

Bonnie lists the building blocks of parallel structures:

Parallel elements have the same weight and are often the same part of speech. Noun, noun, noun. Check. Adjective, adjective, adjective. Yep. Verb, verb, verb. Parallelism is all about equality; parallelism creates a nice rhythm in your sentence.