All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

If you want to be more persuasive, what’s the single most important technique you can master?

No, it isn’t knowing more about the subject than your colleagues. It isn’t even knowing more about the subject this week than you knew last week.

Nice tries, though. But evidence and logic are shaky persuaders under the best of circumstances. If, in place of evidence and logic your expertise becomes the lead story, your audience likely won’t even pay attention to your evidence and logic.

How about threats? If the behavior of our political leaders provides any guidance, threatening those who disagree with severe consequences … ranging from ostracism to physical violence … would seem to be a high-payoff strategy.

But no.

On the national stage, various forms of intimidation do seem to be effective ways to keep political kin in line on an issue-by-issue basis. And yes, intimidation can be just as effective in a business setting, so long as you remember the ROT principle from the KJR Manifesto: Relationships Outlive Transactions.

Which is to say you might win a battle … a transaction … but if you win it through intimidation you damage relationships you might need to rely on later on in your tenure, when you need allies and not just grudging followers.

So yes, intimidation might get people to parrot a particular position you want them to espouse, but you won’t have convinced them you’re right. You’ll just have convinced them you’re to be avoided whenever possible.

Or ganged up on at the first opportunity.

Maybe you should sign up for a debating society, to hone your argumentative skills.

Maybe, but I don’t think so. The point of debating is to decide who’s the best debater, not which side of an argument is more valid. I’m as happy to cede the Star Debater Award in a disagreement as I am to cede the Star Baker award in the Great British Baking Show to, well, to just about anyone.

Give up? (You might as well. I’m going to keep on writing without having heard whatever you were about to propose.)

Now this is just my opinion, mind you: One of the most effective ways to be persuasive is to be wrong.

Not wrong about the subject in question. Not wrong about any specific subject, for that matter.

See, what’s hardest about getting someone to change their mind about a subject is that when I decide what opinion to espouse on a subject, inside I invest my ego in it, while outside I stake my reputation. No matter what you say, my self-esteem is linked to my having decided well and my prestige is at stake.

Which is why the answer to this week’s challenge is to be publicly, visibly, and cheerfully wrong about something from time to time.

Change your mind about subject A and you’ll be more persuasive about subject B, not less. That’s because changing your mind without any noticeable grief establishes that it’s okay to be persuaded.

And because you’re known to change your mind in the face of new evidence and a different way of thinking about things, that also means that when you don’t change your mind about a different subject you’re more likely to be right than someone who never admits to being wrong.

Bob’s last word: The most persuasive argument isn’t “My major premise is A. My minor premise is B. My conclusion is C.” No, the most persuasive argument is, “I used to think A. Then B explained C to me, and it completely changed my thinking about this.”

Bob’s sales pitch: Looking for the perfect seasonal gift? Sorry. Can’t help you.

But if you’re looking for one of the most unusual to give someone with unusual tastes, or a way to make a statement (I’ll leave it to you to decide what statement this makes), give the gift that will make them wonder just what you mist think of them: Bob and Dave’s far-from-best-selling novel about the notorious Wisconsin Rapids elephant murder – The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris.

Comments

|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

I wasn’t in the mood. I’ve been writing about shadow IT in recent columns, and discovered what follows from 21 years ago. It delivers some messages I’ve been wanting to cover without my having had to put fingers to keyboard.

Hope you like it.

– Bob

# # #

System changes are like Mexican butterflies.

For decades, we’ve been migrating functionality from applications to infrastructure. We used to choose the best application and bought whatever platform it ran on, congesting our data centers with a hodgepodge of incompatible systems. We’re smarter now … we understand that eliminating redundancy is as important in the platform layer of our technical architectures as in our data designs, so we establish technology standards and require new business applications to be compatible with them. In doing so, we’ve moved the physical interfaces, especially network and DBMS compatibility, into the technical architecture — we’ve moved functionality into the infrastructure.

With OO we create a library of reusable objects. Before OO we created subroutine libraries and COPYLIBs. These libraries are part of the infrastructure, too.

Have you installed an ERP suite? If you do, it has an API that turns it into a platform. By acting as a platform and not just an application, ERP has also moved functionality into the infrastructure.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) has the same result. It turns data and logic interfaces, which used to be part of your applications, into yet another part of the infrastructure.

Every time you move something into the infrastructure you improve maintainability, integration, consistency … all good things. Unfortunately, you also lose flexibility, because with all of these benefits comes interconnectedness. Like the butterfly of chaos theory, which supposedly messes up the weather in New England by flapping its wings in Mexico, even tiny application changes can have unexpected and significant consequences.

That’s a problem, because while we’re busily moving everything in sight into the infrastructure, increasingly sophisticated business leaders, workgroup supervisors and individual end-users spot endless opportunities for improving the business through information technology. Maybe it’s a Macintosh in marketing. Maybe it’s a tracking system for the trade-show team, a contacts database for public relations, or thought-mapping software for strategic planning.

Whatever it is, it represents a business improvement opportunity for some small community of interest in the company and another headache for you. They get the benefit, you have to maintain it, make sure it continues to operate when you upgrade hardware and operating systems, integrate it … and then it becomes part of the infrastructure, too.

It’s easier to just turn down these requests, because approving them all feels like being smothered by a swarm of Mexican Chaos Butterflies.

There is a third alternative to rejection and asphyxiation: Recognize that moving everything into the infrastructure is the equivalent of creating a centrally planned economy — in this case, an information economy. As we learned by watching the eastern bloc fall apart, when it comes to economies, central planning has its limits.

Not everything belongs in the infrastructure. Create a space outside the infrastructure for beneficial uses of information technology that just don’t fit, and don’t have to fit.

Create a multilevel support framework that establishes the ground-rules. A standalone system can be pretty much anything. If it needs to run on the network you need a traffic analysis; if it needs read-only access to existing databases you need volume estimates and adherence to security standards. If it needs to update core data … sorry, that’s a Mexican Butterfly.

For projects fitting the framework, the requestor is free to contract with an outside company — you’ll recommend one — and you’ll work with the contractor to make sure the results fit into this framework.

Don’t create the framework on your own. Develop it with key business users and ask your Systems Steering Committee to endorse it — it can’t succeed unless the rest of the business accepts responsibility and accountability for the information systems they ask for. Not everyone does. Sometimes, people asking for your help want you to turn them down. That way, they get credit for trying without the pain of change; you get the blame for being an obstacle to progress.

Turn the tables. Give them the worst thing anyone can get: Exactly what they’ve asked for.

Comments