What’s your management approach when it comes to communications? This article can’t be shared enough. Credit to HBR.
Around 11 p.m., you realize there’s a key step your team needs to take on a current project. So, you dash off an email to the team members while you’re thinking about it.
No time like the present, right?
Wrong. As a productivity trainer specializing in attention management, I’ve seen over the past decade how after-hours emails speed up corporate cultures. That, in turn, chips away at creativity, innovation, and true productivity.
If this is a common behavior for you, you’re missing the opportunity to get some distance from work, Distance that’s critical to the fresh perspective you need as the leader. And, when the boss is working, the team feels like they should be working.
Think about the message you’d like to send.
Do you intend for your staff to reply to you immediately? Or are you just sending the email because you’re thinking about it at the moment, and want to get it done before you forget? If it’s the former, you’re intentionally chaining your employees to the office 24/7. If it’s the latter, you’re unintentionally chaining your employees to the office 24/7. And this isn’t good for you, your employees, or your company culture. Being connected in off-hours during busy times is the sign of a high-performer. Never disconnecting is a sign of a workaholic. And there is a difference.
Regardless of your intent, I’ve found through my experience with hundreds of companies that there are two reasons late-night email habits spread from the boss to her team:
Ambition.
If the boss is emailing late at night or on weekends, most employees think a late night response is required. Or that they’ll impress you if they respond immediately. Even if just a couple of your employees share this belief, it could spread through your whole team. A casual mention in a meeting, “When we were emailing last night…” is all it takes. After all, everyone is looking for an edge in their career.
Attention.
There are lots of people who have no intention of “working” when they aren’t at work. But they have poor attention management skills. They’re accustomed to multitasking, and used to constant distractions. Regardless of what else they’re doing, they find their fingers mindlessly tapping the icons on their smartphones that connect them to their emails, texts, and social media. Your late-night communication feeds that bad habit.
Being “always on” hurts results. When employees are constantly monitoring their email after work hours — whether this is due to a fear of missing something from you, or because they are addicted to their devices — they are missing out on essential down time that brains need.
Experiments have shown that to deliver our best at work, we require downtime. Time away produces new ideas and fresh insights. But your employees can never disconnect when they’re always reaching for their devices to see if you’ve emailed. Creativity, inspiration, and motivation are your competitive advantage. They are also depletable resources that need to recharge. Incidentally, this is also true for you, so it’s worthwhile to examine your own communication habits.
Company management can help unhealthy assumptions about email and other communication from taking root.
Be clear about expectations for email and other communications. Set up policies to support a healthy culture recognizing and valuing single-tasking, focus, and downtime.
Vynamic, a successful healthcare consultancy in Philadelphia, created a policy called “zmail.” Email is discouraged between 10pm and 7am during the week, and all day on weekends. The policy doesn’t prevent work during these times, nor does it prohibit communication. If an after-hours message seems necessary, the staff assesses whether it’s important enough to require a phone call. If employees choose to work during off-hours, zmail discourages them from putting their habits onto others by sending emails during this time. They simply save the messages as drafts to be manually sent later, or they program their email client to automatically send the messages during work hours.
This policy creates alignment between the stated belief that downtime is important, and the behaviors of the staff that contribute to the culture.
Also, take a hard look at the attitudes of leaders regarding an always-on work environment.
The (often unconscious) belief that more work equals more success is difficult to overcome, but the truth is that this is neither beneficial nor sustainable. Long work hours actually decrease both productivity and engagement. I’ve seen that often, leaders believe theoretically in downtime, but they also want to keep company objectives moving forward — which seems like it requires constant communication.
A frantic environment that includes answering emails at all hours doesn’t make your staff more productive. It just makes them busy and distracted. You base your staff hiring decisions on their knowledge, experience, and unique talents, not how many tasks they can seemingly do at once, or how many emails they can answer in a day.
So, demonstrate and encourage an environment where employees can actually apply that brain power in a meaningful way:
Ditch the phrase “time management” for the more relevant “attention management,” and make training on this crucial skill part of your staff development plan.
Refrain from after-hours communication.
Model and discuss the benefits of presence, by putting away your devices when speaking with your staff, and implementing a “no device” policy in meetings to promote single-tasking and full engagement.
Discourage an always-on environment of distraction that inhibits creative flow by emphasizing the importance of focus, balancing an open floor plan with plenty of quiet spaces, and creating part-time remote work options for high concentration roles, tasks, and projects.
These behaviors will contribute to a higher quality output from yourself and your staff, and a more productive corporate culture.
I love this post. Originally titled, Misleading Types of Graphs For The Media, it not only tears down the repeated claims and promoted metrics of video dominance, traditional media reach and more, it also questions info we are presented and often take for granted. Much like Nate Silverman discusses in The Signal and the Noise, be sure you are discerning the correct application of metrics and context. Long, but so worth your time. -pw
The Importance of Skepticism
My friend Avinash Kaushik posted a wonderful article the other day about the importance of analysts to have a skeptical nature. I absolutely agree with him. Skepticism, along with fact-checking, and a strong urge to take a step back to look at things from the larger perspective, is the key trait of anyone working with metrics and media strategies.
But I want to expand on his article because there are several types of graphs that I see all the time. Each painting a completely misleading picture. And each one of these is dominating the media landscape. And constantly used in presentations at pretty much all of the big media conferences.
So let’s talk about this.
The curse of the market share graphs
The first truly misleading graph metrics is the one most people use to indicate market share. Either of their own business, their audiences, or the things that we use to get our publications to the market.
For instance, take a look at this graph:
Here you see two different things/products/whatever and how they changed from 2011 to 2016. So, what conclusions do you get from this?
The conclusion most people come to is that the yellow market has experienced catastrophic decline. While the red market is dominating more and more.
Right? Eh… no. What if I told you that the yellow market hadn’t declined at all? And to prove this, here is the exact same graph but using the raw numbers instead of a percentage.
What’s actually happening here is that the market overall has expanded. The yellow market has experience only a minor growth. While the new red market has created an entirely new market on top of the old one.
You see how bad this is?
The first graph forced you to come to entirely wrong conclusions.
So, one of many places where this is happening is when people talk about the rise of mobile. For instance, people keep talking about how laptop computers are dead, and the graph they use is the one below.
What you see here is the same as before. As a percentage, mobile has been growing rapidly over the past five years at what looks like the expense of laptops. And if you see this graph (or those similar that are widely circulated by media executives) you may indeed think that laptops are dead.
What makes this graph even worse is when it is backed up by graphs showing volume of sales, where, again, mobile is dominating. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. We buy a new mobile at a much higher frequency than laptops. Especially today where we have so many devices to play with.
So, are laptops dying?
Is it game over for desktop computing? Nope… not even close.
Because here are the exact same numbers, but this time drawn using their real data instead of as a percentage. And what you see here is that laptop use per person is the same today as it was five years ago.
The growth of personal laptop usage may have peaked, at slightly less than 3 hours per day. But it shows no sign of decline. What has happened instead is that we now have a new mobile market on top of the old one. It’s not killing the laptops. It’s extending it.
Think about how many times people have told you that mobile is killing laptops over the past few years. Both at media conferences and on Twitter. It’s just insane how many have been fooled by looking at percentages instead of the actual numbers.
Don’t be one of those people. Always insist on seeing the real metrics.
There is, however, an even worse example than this. And that’s when we see studies from newspaper associations. Almost all of them are using completely misleading graphs by default. Either because they don’t know any better. Or, worse, because they are trying to hide the decline that we all know is happening.
The main reason why these graphs are so bad is because not only are they based on total percentages, they are also leaving out critical data.
Think about it like this. Imagine your market was defined by three types of audiences. Print, digital and not reached. Not reached are the people who have stopped reading newspapers as we know them.
Now imagine that we map this change over the past five years, we might see something like this:
What we see here is that the market overall is going up (due to the growth in population). But the share of people who don’t subscribe to newspapers is increasing. For newspapers, their market is in heavy decline. And even though digital is growing, it in no way makes up for the decline.
Sound familiar?
But then the newspaper associations do a study. And instead of looking at the market as a whole, they decide to only look at their remaining market. In other words, they decide to simply ignore all the people who have been lost, and then map the rest as a percentage.
The result is a graph that looks like this:
Now we have the same problem as before. This graph is not only completely useless, but also completely misleading. Now, you no longer see any sign that the market is in trouble. And while digital is growing, it looks like print is still going strong.
This is terrible.
One example of this was when the Canadian newspaper measurement agency Vividata published this study:
Just look at this. This graph actually makes it look like newspapers are winning. They are up from 77% reach to 81% reach. And even the magazines are doing fantastically. Sure they are down by a bit, but it’s nowhere close to anything that could threaten their future.
This is great. The Canadian newspaper industry has apparently found a way to keep winning with print. No problem here. Right?
Eh… no. The reality is, of course, that the media industry in Canada is in just as much trouble as newspapers anywhere else in the western world. And that their circulation and advertising revenue is in a terrible state… like what we see here:
I’m not saying that Vividata’s data is wrong. It’s probably an accurate reflection of what they measured. But what I am saying is that they designed the study to only look at things that had no real use for the challenges newspapers are faced with.
As they say:
Seventy percent of newspaper readers still read a printed edition daily. That’s down from 90% five years ago. While print remains the leading source for most newspaper readers in Canada today, digital and cross-platform continues to grow.
No. Just no. This is an idiotic way to look at the data.
The future of the newspaper industry is challenged by external factors. So it makes absolutely no sense to do a study that only looks at the internal factors. This is stupidity at its worst, and it has a serious consequence.
When the Spiegel’s Innovation report was leaked last week, one of the key problems they found was that they ‘lacked a sense of urgency’. And of course they did. If you are constantly being told print is still leading and digital is growing, you don’t feel any need to change. Things sound like they are going fine.
But this is not the reality.
So, be skeptical about newspaper studies. Almost every one of them is disastrously misleading. Especially so if they are based on percentages. Whenever I see a newspaper study that has percentages in it, my red warning lights begin flashing.
Not understanding what is being studied
Another huge problem that we see with studies and metrics about the media industry is that we often see that studies that are measuring one thing are used to prove something completely different.
One example is this slide from BBC’s Esra Doğramacı at the News:Rewired conference.
I have lost count of how many times I have seen media people use this study in relation to video. And people were absolutely lapping it up at the conference. Several people tweeted that video was the only thing to focus on in the future.
But this is not what that study is saying. The Cisco study has nothing to do with video consumption. It doesn’t tell us anything about whether people actually watch video more than before in relation to the media.
There are a number of reasons for this.
Firstly, the Cisco study is looking at the volume of network traffic going through their routers for all internet traffic as a whole. It’s not looking at video consumption specifically.
This alone is highly misleading. You think that an increase in video use means people also watch more video. But that’s not necessarily true.
Consider this.
Imagine that it’s 2010, back with poor wifi and relatively slow mobile devices. You look at the consumption patterns of a single person. So, you have a person reading 10 articles, at 2 MB, and spending 2 minutes reading each. Then this person also watches one video, at 360p (again because of slow connections), at 16 MB, spending 6 minutes.
What you get is this:
As you can see, 44% of the data usage metrics and 23% of the time spent goes to video, the rest goes to the articles.
Now fast forward to 2016. We now have 4K and amazingly fast wifi connections, so now we have got this:
You see what’s happened here?
In this example, the consumption pattern stayed the same. This person is still only spending 23% of his time watching video. But look at the data usage metrics. It’s now 96% going to video.
And this is what the Cisco study is predicting. It is looking at the size of the video files and it’s projecting how much data that will require in 2019. Cisco is not talking about time spent.
See the movie and read the book or vice versa. Either way, you’re in for a terrific ride. In a riveting fashion, Michael Lewis describes and makes sense out of the 2008 financial collapse that destroyed almost everything in its path. The real key to this story’s success is Lewis’ attention to the eccentric cast of characters. Some saw it coming from as far as a decade away.
It really doesn’t matter what you think of Elon Musk, his story and work are amazing. Musk is one of the few extremely non-risk-averse entrepreneurs out there. He also happens to be talented, smart and not afraid to question, defy and oftentimes battle the status quo. (A LOT like Richard Branson, up next.) The biography by Ashlee Vance is honest, compelling and pulls no punches with Musk’s frequently challenging personality. Take the time to read and get inspired by one of the biggest thinkers alive.
Speaking of non-risk-averse types, let’s talk about Richard Branson. His business and lifestyle motto “Screw it, let’s do it” is tempered by his thoughts on successes and failures in his career. The history alone of how Branson developed into one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time –after an unauspicious start as a sixteen-year-old dropout with dyslexia– makes one sit up and listen.
But it’s his wise and experienced approach on how he chooses to lead with an emphasis on people/relationships and less on formality that makes the book so valuable. Another book by Branson, Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way gets a favorable mention here. Especially or the additional and very entertaining details on how Branson went from magazine publisher, to mail order record business to a recording studio/company to an airlines. And his (ad)ventures in just about every product imaginable. Virgin Cola anyone?
Malcolm Gladwell has critics, but I appreciate his focus and interest in areas I find fascinating. I have been a fan of his since The Tipping Point and Blink. Both books made me reexamine a few ideas I had about the world. And reshaped a lot of the thinking I bring into my daily work. Outliers explores how people become extraordinary (or at least successful in their chosen fields). It isn’t always how you might think.
The founder and editor of FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver gained national celebrity status after his almost exact prediction of the 2008 and 2012 elections. This book examines the difficulty in discerning what is relevant in collected statistics. And what may be simply unnecessary and sometimes misleading information. Anyone interested in analytics, statistics, prediction, numbers, science, economics and “seeking truth from data” will enjoy.
Intriguing book by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. It examines the way our brain processes information. As I listened to this, I wished I was able to do some of the exercises the book asks you to do to help discern its examples. Kahneman presents a very thoughtful and revealing view on how perspectives are easily skewed.
A recent study by Nielsen shows 63% of shoppers research products online.* Youtility mentions as far back as 2011, shoppers accessed 10.4 pieces of information before making a purchase. This provides one of the many foundations upon which Jay Baer [Convince and Convert] lays his case that objective, helpful information is appreciated more than ever before by the consumer. By examining entrepreneurs and businesses providing useful content, Baer points out the payoffs for taking the time to create collateral that may -at first- seem like a lot of effort when compared to traditional marketing tactics. I used this book in teaching Entrepreneurial Marketing. Many students enjoyed it, finding it a refreshing counterpoint to traditional marketing and business tactics. Strongly recommended.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit I read this one as its Machiavellian approach makes you feel as though you’re preparing for a role on Game of Thrones. It basically serves as a primer on how to manipulate your way into getting what you want. If you work in an environment of snakes (and this book assures you everyone -including yourself- is a snake) then this is the book to read. However, there is some good advice in its pages. And quite a few in business have read it, along with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. You might as well arm yourself so you can see ’em coming.
That’s all for now. I’ll update as I come across new books worthy of note. Please leave any suggestions for books that you have particularly enjoyed in the comments below!
A must-read. You will most likely recognize the first work culture environment described. And perhaps enjoy a few suggestions for change. – pw
HBR
If there’s one place on earth where originality goes to die, I’d managed to find it. I was charged with unleashing innovation and change in the ultimate bastion of bureaucracy. It was a place where people accepted defaults without question. Followed rules without explanation. And clung to traditions and technologies long after they’d become obsolete. The U.S. Navy.
But in a matter of months, the navy was exploding with originality—and not because of anything I’d done. It launched a major innovation task force. And helped to form a Department of Defense outpost in Silicon Valley to get up to speed on cutting-edge technology. Surprisingly, these changes didn’t come from the top of the navy’s command-and-control structure. They initiated from the bottom, by a group of junior officers in their twenties and thirties.
When I started digging for more details, multiple insiders pointed to a young aviator named Ben Kohlmann. Officers called him a troublemaker, rabble-rouser, disrupter, heretic, and radical. And in direct violation of the military ethos, these were terms of endearment.
Kohlmann lit the match by creating the navy’s first rapid-innovation cell. A network of original thinkers who would collaborate to question long-held assumptions and generate new ideas. To start assembling the group, he searched for black sheep. People with a history of nonconformity. One recruit was fired from a nuclear submarine for disobeying a commander’s order. Another had flat-out refused to go to basic training. Others had yelled at senior flag officers and flouted chains of command by writing public blog posts to express their iconoclastic views. “They were lone wolves,” Kohlmann says. “Most of them had a track record of insubordination.”
Kohlmann realized, however, that to fuel and sustain innovation throughout the navy, he needed more than a few lone wolves. So while working as an instructor and director of flight operations, he set about building a culture of nonconformity.
He talked to senior leaders about expanding his network and got their buy-in. He recruited sailors who had never shown a desire to challenge the status quo and exposed them to new ways of thinking. They visited centers of innovation excellence outside the military, from Google to the Rocky Mountain Institute. They devoured a monthly syllabus of readings on innovation and debated ideas during regular happy hours and robust online discussions. Soon they pioneered the use of 3-D printers on ships and a robotic fish for stealth underwater missions—and other rapid-innovation cells began springing up around the military. “Culture is king,” Kohlmann says. “When people discovered their voice, they became unstoppable.”
Empowering the rank and file to innovate is where most leaders fall short. Instead, they try to recruit brash entrepreneurial types to bring fresh ideas and energy into their organizations—and then leave it at that. It’s a wrongheaded approach, because it assumes that the best innovators are rare creatures with special gifts.
Research shows that entrepreneurs who succeed over the long haul are actually more risk-averse than their peers. The hotshots burn bright for a while but tend to fizzle out. So relying on a few exceptional folks who fit a romanticized creative profile is a short-term move that underestimates everyone else. Most people are in fact quite capable of novel thinking and problem solving, if only their organizations would stop pounding them into conformity.
When everyone thinks in similar ways and sticks to dominant norms, businesses are doomed to stagnate. To fight that inertia and drive innovation and change effectively, leaders need sustained original thinking in their organizations. They get it by building a culture of nonconformity, as Kohlmann did in the navy. I’ve been studying this for the better part of a decade, and it turns out to be less difficult than I expected.
For starters, leaders must give employees opportunities and incentives to generate—and keep generating—new ideas, so that people across functions and roles get better at pushing past the obvious. However, it’s also critical to have the right people vetting those ideas. That part of the process should be much less democratic and more meritocratic, because some votes are simply more meaningful than others. And finally, to continue generating and selecting smart ideas over time, organizations need to strike a balance between cultural cohesion and creative dissent.
Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom
People often believe that to do better work, they should do fewer things. Yet the evidence flies in the face of that assumption: Being prolific actually increases originality, because sheer volume improves your chances of finding novel solutions. In recent experiments by Northwestern University psychologists Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren, the initial ideas people generated were the most conventional. Once they had thought of those, they were free to start dreaming up more-unusual possibilities. Their first 20 ideas were significantly less original than their next 15.
Across fields, volume begets quality. This is true for all kinds of creators and thinkers—from composers and painters to scientists and inventors. Even the most eminent innovators do their most original work when they’re also cranking out scores of less brilliant ideas. Consider Thomas Edison. In a five-year period, he came up with the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon transmitter used in telephones—while also filing more than 100 patents for inventions that didn’t catch the world on fire, including a talking doll that ended up scaring children (and adults).
Of course, in organizations, the challenge lies in knowing when you’ve drummed up enough possibilities. How many ideas should you generate before deciding which ones to pursue? When I pose this question to executives, most say you’re really humming with around 20 ideas. But that answer is off the mark by an order of magnitude. There’s evidence that quality often doesn’t max out until more than 200 ideas are on the table.
Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes that the Pixar movie Cars was chosen from about 500 pitches, and at Skyline, the toy design studio that generates ideas for Fisher-Price and Mattel, employees submitted 4,000 new toy concepts in one year. That set was winnowed down to 230 to be drawn or prototyped, and just 12 were finally developed. The more darts you throw, the better your odds of hitting a bull’s-eye.
Though it makes perfect sense, many managers fail to embrace this principle, fearing that time spent conjuring lots of ideas will prevent employees from being focused and efficient. The good news is that there are ways to help employees generate quantity and variety without sacrificing day-to-day productivity or causing burnout.
Think like the enemy. Research suggests that organizations often get stuck in a rut because they’re playing defense, trying to stave off the competition. To encourage people to think differently and generate more ideas, put them on offense.
That’s what Lisa Bodell of futurethink did when Merck CEO Ken Frazier hired her to help shake up the status quo. Bodell divided Merck’s executives into groups and asked them to come up with ways to put the company out of business. Instead of being cautious and sticking close to established competencies, the executives started considering bold new directions in strategy and product development that competitors could conceivably take.
Energy in the room soared as they explored the possibilities. The offensive mindset, Carnegie Mellon professor Anita Woolley observes, focuses attention on “pursuing opportunities…whereas defenders are more focused on maintaining their market share.” That mental shift allowed the Merck executives to imagine competitive threats that didn’t yet exist. The result was a fresh set of opportunities for innovation.
According to decades of research, you get more and better ideas if people are working alone in separate rooms than if they’re brainstorming in a group. When people generate ideas together, many of the best ones never get shared. Some members dominate the conversation, others hold back to avoid looking foolish, and the whole group tends to conform to the majority’s taste.
Evidence shows that these problems can be managed through “brainwriting.” All that’s required is asking individuals to think up ideas on their own before the group evaluates them, to get all the possibilities on the table.
For instance, at the eyewear retailer Warby Parker, named the world’s most innovative company by Fast Company in 2015, employees spend a few minutes a week writing down innovation ideas for colleagues to read and comment on. The company also maintains a Google doc where employees can submit requests for new technology to be built, which yields about 400 new ideas in a typical quarter. One major innovation was a revamped retail point of sale, which grew out of an app that allowed customers to bookmark their favorite frames in the store and receive an e-mail about them later.
Since employees often withhold their most unusual suggestions in group settings, another strategy for seeking ideas is to schedule rapid one-on-one idea meetings. When Anita Krohn Traaseth became managing director of Hewlett-Packard Norway, she launched a “speed-date the boss” initiative. She invited every employee to meet with her for five minutes and answer these questions: Who are you and what do you do at HP? Where do you think we should change, and what should we keep focusing on? And what do you want to contribute beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities?
She made it clear that she expected people to bring big ideas, and they didn’t want to waste their five minutes with a senior leader—it was their chance to show that they could innovate. More than 170 speed dates later, so many good ideas had been generated that other HP leaders implemented the process in Austria and Switzerland.
Bring back the suggestion box.
It’s a practice that dates back to the early 1700s, when a Japanese shogun put a box at the entrance to his castle. He rewarded good ideas—but punished criticisms with decapitation. Today suggestion boxes are often ridiculed. “I smell a creative idea being formed somewhere in the building,” the boss thinks in one Dilbert cartoon. “I must find it and crush it.” He sets up a suggestion box, and Dilbert is intrigued until a colleague warns him: “It’s a trap!!”
But the evidence points to a different conclusion: Suggestion boxes can be quite useful, precisely because they provide a large number of ideas. In one study, psychologist Michael Frese and his colleagues visited a Dutch steel company (now part of Tata Steel) that had been using a suggestion program for 70 years.
The company had 11,000 employees and collected between 7,000 and 12,000 suggestions a year. A typical employee would make six or seven suggestions annually and see three or four adopted. One prolific innovator submitted 75 ideas and had 30 adopted. In many companies, those ideas would be missed altogether. For the Dutch steelmaker, however, the suggestion box regularly led to improvements—saving more than $750,000 in one year alone.
The major benefit of suggestion boxes is that they multiply and diversify the ideas on the horizon, opening up new avenues for innovation. The biggest hurdle is that they create a larger haystack of ideas, making it more difficult to find the needle. You need a system for culling contributions—and rewarding and pursuing the best ones—so that people don’t feel their suggestions are falling on deaf ears.
Developing a Nose for Good Ideas
Generating lots of alternatives is important, but so is listening to the right opinions and solutions. How can leaders avoid pursuing bad ideas and rejecting good ones?
Lean on proven evaluators.
Although many leaders use a democratic process to select ideas, not every vote is equally valuable. Bowing to the majority’s will is not the best policy; a select minority might have a better sense of which ideas have the greatest potential. To figure out whose votes should be amplified, pay attention to employees’ track records in evaluation.
At the hedge fund Bridgewater, employees’ opinions are weighted by a believability score, reflecting the quality of their past decisions in that domain. In the U.S. intelligence community, analysts demonstrate their credibility by forecasting major political and economic events.
In studies by psychologist Philip Tetlock, forecasters are rated on accuracy (did they make the right bets?) and calibration (did they get the probabilities right?). After identifying the best of these prognosticators, their judgments can get greater influence than those of their peers.
So, in a company, who’s likely to have the strongest track record? Not managers—it’s too easy for them to stick to existing prototypes. And not the innovators themselves. Intoxicated by their own “eureka” moments, they tend to be overconfident about their odds of success.
They may try to compensate for that by researching customer preferences, but they’ll still be susceptible to confirmation bias (looking for information that supports their view and rejecting the rest). Even creative geniuses have trouble predicting with any accuracy when they’ve come up with a winner.
A Syllabus for Innovators
When aviator Ben Kohlmann set out to build a culture of nonconformity in the U.S. Navy, he found inspiration in many sources. Here’s a sampling of the items he recommends to people who want to think more creatively, along with his comments on how they’ve influenced his own development.
A Syllabus for Innovators
When aviator Ben Kohlmann set out to build a culture of nonconformity in the U.S. Navy, he found inspiration in many sources. Here’s a sampling of the items he recommends to people who want to think more creatively, along with his comments on how they’ve influenced his own development.
Speeches
“Lead Like the Great Conductors”
TED talk by Itay Talgam
We can learn from professions we have no understanding of. People are people—and recognizing the commonalities is useful.
“How Great Leaders Inspire Action”
TED talk by Simon Sinek
Sinek cracks the code of influence: Deep-seated desire is what inspires followers and builds movements.
Fiction
Ender’s Game
by Orson Scott Card
This novel illustrates how tactical and strategic teams can be adaptable—and how genius can emerge at a young age. It’s especially apropos reading in the military, where we promote on seniority and not merit.
Dune
by Frank Herbert
A compelling story about insurgency and taking on established powers, Dune explores the ambiguous nature of messianic saviors.
Nonfiction
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz
We’re wrong a lot, and yet we almost never admit it. Schulz helped me critically evaluate my own biases and better understand how people view and portray themselves.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
by Ben Horowitz
Horowitz doesn’t merely talk about how to lead; he lives it. And who doesn’t love a guy who starts his chapters with rap lyrics?
The (Mis)behavior of Markets
by Benoit Mandelbrot
Mandelbrot is the father of fractal theory, and his insight into how that plays into the stock market transformed my understanding of luck’s role in managerial successes and failures.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
by Carol Dweck
Intelligence is not fixed, Dweck argues. My world opened up once I discovered that we can grow into what we want to be.
Letters to a Young Contrarian
by Christopher Hitchens
I’m a person of faith, but I appreciate the way Hitchens incisively questions everything, even faith. I’ve used his methods many a time to develop contrarian positions and win debates.
TV Shows
Sherlock(BBC series)
Each episode is pure fun—but yields lots of learning at the same time.
Research suggests that fellow innovators are the best evaluators of original ideas. They’re impartial, because they’re not judging their own ideas, and they’re more willing than managers to give radical possibilities a chance. For example, Stanford professor Justin Berg found that circus performers who evaluated videos of their peers’ new acts were about twice as accurate as managers in predicting popularity with audiences.
Adam Grant is a professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Viking, 2016).
Want to dip your toes in the entrepreneurial waters by freelancing while keeping your full-time job? You’re not alone — countless other people do, too.
Since I began freelancing just over a year ago, I’ve had the opportunity to work with nearly a dozen high-growth startups and world-class experts. What’s more, I’ve never had to negotiate for the premium prices I charge for my content marketing services.
Because I’ve done such an effective job of defining my value propositions. Branding myself as an expert within my field, and getting my content in front of new target audiences. I now have a 3-6 month waiting list for new freelance clients.
However, that certainly didn’t happen overnight. My rapid success in the world of freelancing is the result of a lot of strategic positioning. Hours of hard work, and good timing.
If you’re ready to get serious about freelancing and multiplying your self-employed income. My top twelve tips for earning more during your first year.
But before before you get started, check out something awesome I helped put together, The Ultimate Guide to Going Freelance on Skillcrush. You’ll find tips for learning the tech skills you need to get started. Strategies for adopting “the freelance mindset,” plus tricks for building a “career safety net” before quitting your day job. (Get the guide here.)
Here we go:
1. Choose a niche.
If you’re new to freelancing, you might feel ready to take any paid work you can get your hands on. But as you get deeper into your freelancing career you’ll need to start being more strategic about the types of work you do and the clients you take on.
You might be thinking: How can getting picky about the freelance work I do help me make MORE money?
Because when you specialize, you become an expert in a specific field. And experts can charge more for their specialized services.
In my opinion, the age-old debate of whether you should be a specialist or a generalist when starting your freelancing career isn’t even worth thinking twice about. If you were your client and you needed someone to fix your email marketing so people actually sign up. Write ads that convince people to buy. Or just update your outdated website, would you rather hire someone who’s a jack of all trades. Or a person who’s a pro at doing one thing and doing it extremely well?
I’ll choose the specialist every time.
And when it comes to my own experience, choosing to specialize as a content marketing consultant–as opposed to being a general digital marketer for hire–has been the single best decision I’ve made with my freelancing business. Because I’ve built my reputation with clients as a talented content marketer over the past few years. And frequently engage with content marketing content on various social media channels, I’ve been able to rise to the top of my niche in a relatively short period of time. This is one of my favorite takeaways from Becoming a Successful Freelancer over on CreativeLive.
Aside from my blog and existing client referrals, the next most consistent source of new clients has been from business owners seeking out specific expert help. Through both Google and social searches like the one above from Twitter.
So to expand this example to other fields, imagine you are just starting out as a web developer. You can get into a niche like migrating blogs to WordPress. That means when someone searches for “help with migrating a blog to WordPress,” they can find you.
If you choose the right niche, deciding to specialize and putting some effort into branding yourself as an expert within your niche can really pay off for years to come.
2. Get clear on your service offerings.
One major decision you need to make early on in your freelancing career is what you do and what you don’t do.
The more specific you can be about what services you offer, the better. Not only will it help you brand yourself, it’ll allow you to control how potential clients perceive you and give you the opportunity to continue building your portfolio in the direction you want to move in.
If you want to focus on becoming a sought after, highly paid Ruby on Rails developer, then you shouldn’t even consider contract offers for customizing WordPress themes or designing the user experience for an upcoming app. While the short-term benefits of steady work are tempting (and sometimes necessary), taking on projects that aren’t getting you closer to your ultimate goal of becoming the best in your field will only distract and delay you from making meaningful progress.
3. Define what your ideal client looks like.
Before you can go out and start looking for clients, you’ll need to develop a clear picture of who you’re going to work best with. Do you want to build websites for small business owners? Pitch in on new feature development for high growth technology startups? Take on longer-term contracts with enterprise-sized companies? Making these clear distinctions between who and what type of business you’re targeting will be essential to effectively pitching your services.
To define exactly who your ideal freelance clients should be (and how to start finding them), ask yourself these questions:
What type of business has the problems I’m solving with my services?
Can the business I want to work with afford to hire me?
What demographic trends can I identify about the decision makers in the types of businesses I’m targeting? Think age, gender, geographic location, websites they frequent, and their personal interests.
Because I know that I’ll be more engaged and work most effectively with smaller startup teams who are working on projects I can personally relate to, I’ve proactively chosen to make my scope of potential clients narrow. By working with similar startup teams, new potential clients I target within my niche are able to instantly relate with me, and have confidence that I’ll be able to replicate my results for their business, too.
It goes without saying that one of the best ways to demonstrate your technical skills is by having an amazing portfolio site of your own. If you want to be taken seriously as a new freelancer, you’re going to need a website that:
Showcases your expertise.
Highlights relevant past experiences.
Shows who you are.
Includes your contact information so that potential clients can easily find you.
Plus, a stellar portfolio can really help you out if you don’t have a lot of job experience to prove that you know your stuff. (Read more about that here: How to Get Hired in Tech With No Experience.)
The purpose of your portfolio is to educate, spark interest, and convince potential clients that they’ll want to choose you for their technical needs. That’s why it’s worth investing time into deciding what to feature on your portfolio and how it’s being displayed–before you start looking for new projects.
Once your portfolio site is up, start including a link to the site within your email signature and on your social profiles.
In addition to the fact that creating a high quality portfolio website, building your personal brand, and adding to your portfolio naturally takes a good amount of time, it’s a good idea to have a few steady freelance clients on your roster before axing your sole source of income.
I recommend growing your side income to at least 50-75% of your total current income before leaving your full-time job, depending on your risk tolerance.
Managing a tight schedule, heavy workload (including demanding freelance projects), and being responsible for client deliverables with limited time resources will teach you quickly what it’s like to run your own business.
The other awesome benefit of picking up freelance clients while you’re still working full-time is that you can be selective. You likely don’t absolutely need the money. This puts you in a position to turn down work that either doesn’t pay enough to justify your time investment, or that you’re not genuinely interested in.
These are two points you’ll need to be a stickler about if you want to be happy once you’re freelancing full-time. Check out my list of the 101 best business ideas if you need more inspiration.
Practice using your new skills by building the types of projects that you want to eventually be paid to work on. Whether that’s WordPress websites, mobile apps, or something else entirely, the more you can differentiate yourself among a sea of competition with cool side projects and examples that’ll attract potential customers, the better.
And remember that while highly trained freelancers can get paid much more for their work, you don’t have to head back to school for a B.S. in computer science to get on the train. Taking online classes like a Skillcrush Blueprint can get you on the right track and put you in charge of your education.
7. Build your credibility.
There are many ways to build your credibility within your industry. Aside from creating high quality blog content and collaborating with notable influencers in your industry, you can write an ebook, create an online course, and line up speaking engagements to start increasing your visibility within your niche.
These credibility-boosters can help you add your list of accomplishments that you can highlight on your portfolio and simultaneously demonstrate your knowledge for more potential clients to see. The wider you can broadcast your message, the more influence you’ll build within your niche.
8. Determine your pricing.
While deciding how much to charge for your freelance services is a major step toward determining your perceived value, you need to make sure you’re charging enough to make a sustainable, comfortable living. Most clients won’t hesitate to pay higher rates for a freelancer that gives them an incredible first impression. And sells them on the ability to deliver high quality results.
As long as I continue to deliver consistent value to my clients (beyond their expectations), I have no trouble setting and maintaining high prices for the services I’m providing.
Before setting your prices at the bare minimum you need to charge in order to hit your financial needs, consider the actual value you’d be creating for your potential clients and make sure you’re not leaving money on the table. You can always increase your rates in the future and hope your client stays on board. But if you start at a price point you’re already excited about, you’ll be that much more likely to over-deliver. And continue increasing your value moving forward.
9. Leverage your network for introductions.
One of the most effective ways to land higher quality and better paying freelance work is through leveraging your existing networks. Whether it’s pitching your actual friends and former co-workers on freelance help. Or using their connections to make warm introductions to companies you do want to work with. This is a great alternative to cold contacting potential clients.
Whenever I discover a freelance opportunity I want to pursue on Angel.co,CloudPeeps, or elsewhere, I give myself 10-15 minutes to research the company. Find my ideal point of contact, and do a little homework on if I have a mutual connection on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook before reaching out with a cold email.
If I do have a mutual contact, I’ll reach out to my friend (only if I’m actually friends with them) and ask if they’d mind sending an email introduction on my behalf.
This approach, where my first impression is being endorsed by a recommendation from someone my potential client already knows, has consistently netted me higher response and close rates.
10. Perfect your pitching.
There’s an art and science to pitching your freelance services to new clients. Because it’s such an important part of running a profitable freelance business, I created an entire online course on the topic of writing freelance proposals that convert, and I even give away my freelance proposal template for free.
Landing new clients isn’t just a matter of crafting an awesome freelance proposal. Your success depends on how you’re selecting new jobs, how you position your value propositions, and how much research you do ahead of time.
I’ve won new gigs simply because I clearly put in more time and effort into researching the company. Determining their needs, and providing immense up front value in the form of insightful recommendations before I even discuss payment. In the world of freelancing, much of your success will depend upon the strength of your client relationships, and how well you’re able to forge meaningful partnerships.
11. Blog frequently.
The goal of having a website showcasing your skills is to attract and convert new clients. What better way to increase the number of potential new clients coming across your website than by creating high quality blog content that positions you as a stand out expert within your field?
At the beginning, aim for creating one or two in-depth blog posts per month, geared toward providing truly helpful solutions that your potential clients may be searching for. Note: That means you’ll be writing for an audience of your clients, not other people in your field.
Once they discover your content and get some free value from you, you’ll naturally be top-of-mind if they’re ready to hire out for more in-depth help.
I initiated the majority of the freelance contracts I’ve landed over the last year by mentioning a company in a successful blog post on my website. After publishing my in-depth post chronicling all of the best side business ideas, I spent a lot of time reaching out to a carefully chosen person at each brand or online tool I mentioned. I asked if I cited them correctly within the post. The majority of them wrote back either confirming or offering a suggestion. Which then gave me an opportunity to either pitch a guest post. Ask them to share my content with their audience on social. Or open the door to a potential marketing contract.
My blog has been by far my highest return marketing channel for my freelance business.
12. Guest post on relevant industry blogs and publications.
Once you have a website that highlights your abilities and clearly communicates that you offer freelance services. One of the most effective ways to increase your online visibility is by getting content published on the blogs and publications where your potential customers spend the most time. Marketing guru and consultant Neil Patel frequently shares about the huge contracts he lands for his business. By publishing over 100 guest posts per year.
While you’ll be starting on a much smaller scale, don’t underestimate the immediate benefit of getting your content featured on blogs and publications. That can drive hundreds or even thousands of new visitors to your website. In the span of less than one year, I’ve been able to get my posts published on Entrepreneur, Inc, Business Insider, HubSpot, and dozens more publications by creating extremely high quality content and leveraging my pitching abilities.
This increased visibility has had a direct, positive impact on my business.
