“What’s In A Name?”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Juliet: Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene ii (William Shakespeare)

Back in Shakespeare’s day, we may have introduced ourselves something like this:

“Greetings! I am Liz, daughter of Betty and Phil, House of Clarke; schooled, jointly, at Brock and Toronto; patron to Maple Leafs; friend to all, enemy to none I know.”

These days, our introductions are likely to sound more like this:

“Hi, I’m Jim Smith. That’s jim dot smith at emailaddy.com. On FaceBook, you need to search for JJSmith. Skype knows me as JJSmitherino.”

We all carry around so many identities these days. I think the task of remembering names in fast-paced business contexts has been made even harder with the advent of all the various handles that our wired lives require.

There is a second reason why the task of remembering names has become even more challenging of late. Regardless of which “culture of origin” you can claim as your own, I’m willing to bet that the last 10 years or so has presented you with tons of opportunity to learn interesting yet unfamiliar names. Wherever you are doing business these days, cross-cultural communication has become the “new normal”.

Isn’t it nice just to hear our name, our actual given name, correctly pronounced and spoken out loud from time to time? Sure it is – we all like to hear ourselves referred to in a respectful and business-like manner.  Let’s look at that concept from another angle – remembering other people’s first names properly is a powerful way to differentiate yourself amongst a field of salespeople, candidates or fellow employees.

I get a chance to exercise this muscle regularly in my classes. At the beginning of each semester, I am faced with new groups of students, usually around 30 per class. This semester, once registration settles in, it looks like I will have 102 names to remember! I challenge myself to learn their first names quickly, to learn how to pronounce them properly, and to use those names as often as possible for the first few classes. Why? I believe it shows respect for students as individuals. Students start to feel that “just a number” syndrome. That anonymity, especially in a new and stressful environment,  doesn’t feel so great after a while. If I can help make students feel welcome and comfortable in their first class with me, then I think they may be more open to learning a few things in that very first class.

Here is the thing – I seem to be consistently able to remember everyone’s first name by the end of the first half of the first class. In other words, I seem to be able to absorb and retain 30 first names in about 75 minutes. What is the key to learning and retaining this information? I have three things to offer that might help:

a) Say it / Write it / Say it again: As each student comes into class, I make eye contact, ask them to tell me their name. I listen really carefully and try to locate the first name on my class list. Then I write it down, and then I say it back to them. We might even get into a short exchange about how the name is pronounced. That gives me a chance to practice many more times.

What am I really doing with these short bursts of effort? I am exercising multiple learning styles. We all have a preferred learning style and several secondary ones. The more we use, the greater the possibility that the information will be effectively absorbed, retained and synthesized. In the method I describe above, an individual has:

• listened to the name (aural/auditory)
• spoken the name (verbal/auditory)
• read the name (visual/textual)
• written the name (visual/kinesthetic)

That’s four different ways, in a matter of seconds, that the material can make an impression on the memory banks!

b) Practice On The Fly: As the class unfolds, I usually have a chance to call each student by name, often more than once. Even if I don’t say each name out loud verbally, as I’m looking at each face, I’m mentally saying their name in my head. About 30 minutes in, I may do a practice round to test my accuracy and fill in any blanks I have drawn.

c) Study to Retain: As part of their first class, students complete a little introductory form that tells me a bit more about them and about what they want to learn from my course. In the week between classes, I look at the written name, in their own handwriting, I say the name out loud and review a few details about their interests and aspirations. I may do this a few times in the intervening week. It only takes a few minutes.

Knowing each student by name actually increases MY level of comfort in the class. The people in front of me are more three-dimensional and “real” to me once I know just a tiny bit more about them, beginning with their names.  The students seem pretty impressed with this skill, if I can pull it off after the first 75-90 minutes, and intuitively grasp the importance of remembering/using names as a business communications “must have”.

Students are pretty darn smart, after all, and – just like your clients, colleagues, and co-workers – they know how it feels be released fron anonymity and to be called by name. They know that it takes a wee bit of time and effort to get this one small detail right. If you can get this one skill down, it may speak volumes about you, especially if your job involves being client-centred, or if your KPIs involve motivating teams of employees. In short, “what’s in a name?” Respect for each individual in a world that often leaves people feeling let down in this area. How can you go wrong if you distinguish yourself with this one small skill?

Posted in Communication, Management, Managing People, Team-Building, Uncategorized
Tags: globalization, learning, memory, names, relationship-building, teaching

Reining In The Reign Of E-Mail

Vast quantities of e-mail arrive in my in-box from a variety of sources. Students and colleagues at the college where I teach, clients, hockey affiliations and, of course, personal e-mails. I also get my fair share of junk e-mails. On any given day, I can receive anywhere between 40 and 200 e-mails of the kind that either carry important information, or that require a response.  Many active Internet users are in a similar predicament, some with much larger volumes of mail than I can muster. This is a lot of communication and it requires some thoughtful management, lest your in-box turn into a digital version of your kitchen junk drawer

I have three things to offer on managing incoming e-mails:

Maintain E-Mail Office Hours: Consider the actual legitimate urgency of most e-mails. Unless you are drumming your fingers on your desk, waiting for Jo to send you her latest draft so you can get your deadline met, most e-mail can tolerate a 12-24 hour response time. This means that you could choose two hours of your day – say an hour in the morning and an hour later in the day – to sort and respond to your messages. This means turning OFF all the visual and auditory notifications on your computers and mobile devices. It means not obsessively checking your e-mail every few minutes. It means a return to focus and productivity. Think of it this way – you wouldn’t get much work done if your phone rang every few minutes with non-critical information. Similarly, if your e-mail is vibrating your belt or pocket every few minutes, for no valuable reason, it will needlessly interfere with your concentration. Relax – you have set aside time to deal with whatever is coming in. Of course, the trick is to make sure that you actually maintain your office hours once you have set them.

Create Intelligent Folders: It isn’t enough to say “create folders and then sort your mail into them”. Lots of people create folders and then sort their mail into those folders. However, unless the folders have some kind of logic to them, this process may add to, rather than eliminate confusion and further detract from one’s productivity.

Here is what works for me: This system is based on sorting e-mail by sender. I have seen some people sort based on topic/subject/project however, for me, this would take too much time pondering which folder to put certain messages. After all, any one message might be “about” several things, yet it tends to originate from only one source.

So, to start, the highest level folders represent major activity areas of my life. In my case, a few of these are:

• College
• Business – Operations
• Business – Clients
• Friends
• Hockey

Under each, I start to build a sub-folder structure that makes sense. For example, under “college”, I create semesters by date. For each semester, I start fresh with sub-folders for each course I teach, then “colleagues”, “administration”, “technology” etc. Sometimes, I just let the folder structure build itself organically based on the e-mails I am receiving. Bottom line: if I can remember who sent me something, I’m only a few clicks away from retrieving it.

There is some cross-over. For example, some of my college colleagues are also “friends” – aren’t they lucky – they get two folders! One houses e-mails that are work-related, one stores e-mails of a more personal nature.

Similarly, if you are working on a specific team or committee and receive e-mails related to this specific work – no problem. Give that area of your life its own folder, too. In a way, you are still sorting based on origin. For example, I work with a web designer who has her own folder under my Business-Operations heading. However, when we are working on a specific project for a client, I create a new folder just to house e-mails related to that project. I am still sorting based on who sent the e-mail (the web designer and/or the client) but I can see all the related topical e-mails at a glance.

The objective here is to build a folder structure that will allow you to quickly retrieve information in a few clicks. Experiment a bit and find what works for you.

Triage Your E-Mail: Once you have a folder system/logic that will serve your purposes, let’s turn attention to what you actually do with the time that you have set aside for e-mail correspondence. Again, I will offer what seems to work for me:

• In-box: In an ideal world, this would be empty at the end of the day. In reality, I usually have 10-15 e-mails here that are waiting for me to take some kind of responsive action. I treat my in-box a bit like a “to-do” list. The only e-mail left in my in-box at the end of an ideal e-mail day represents something I need to make a decision about, or something that requires a lengthy response that I haven’t had time for.
  I want to emphasize this point. Get into the habit of examining each e-mail in your in-box at the end of your work day. Is it waiting for you to do something with it? If not, get it out of there! If a folder doesn’t exist to hold it, then it is time to create a new one. Over time, this practice will make dealing with your in-box ever so much easier.
• Junk Mail: There are many spam filtering agents out there that will, for a few dollars per month, do a reasonably good job at filtering out unsolicited e-mails. Most Internet Service Providers (the folks responsible for relaying e-mail to your in-box) also provide hosted solutions as part of their services. It would be worth an hour or so of your time to set up a spam filter, and another few minutes later on to tweak it properly based on its performance.
• Folders: I’m a bit of an e-mail pack rat. I save almost everything. I’d estimate that over half of the e-mail I receive is “FYI” only. It doesn’t require a response. For example, when I’m copied on a conversation between several members of a hockey team on which pub to meet at after the game, I can highlight several responses at a time and move them in one fell swoop. Here is where I’ve learned a useful trick. Most e-mail programs sort e-mail, by default, by date. The newest message will appear at the top. However, most e-mail programs will also allow you to sort your in-box by sender and also by topic. So, say you have exchanged several e-mails on the same topic and now the exchange is done. Provided the subject line has stayed constant, you can just click on the “subject” bar at the top of that column and, voila, all of the relevant e-mail appears in a stack that is easier to highlight and grab. The same principle applies to sorting e-mail by sender. This can really speed up the movement of bundles of e-mail into folders.
• Crisis Triage: Recently, I wound up in bed for a few days as a result of a virus. Classes were cancelled and I fretted over how we would ever get caught up on the missed time. Making matters worse, I lay in bed, knowing full well that my in-box would be filling up with student inquiries, as they would now be anxious about all manner of things – online quizzes, upcoming presentations, assignments, etc. When I finally managed to get in front of my e-mail program, I saw that my worst fears were realized. Furthermore, because all my e-mail is re-directed to one single in-box, student e-mails were mixed in amongst all the other incoming information. Yet, answering them in sequence was a priority.

  I created a new folder for this semester called “Respond ASAP”. As I was grabbing and filing the “FYI” e-mails from my in-box, I was also moving the student inquiries to the “Respond ASAP” folder. This took about 15 minutes, leaving me with a few dozen lower priority e-mails to deal with and a folder of high priority e-mails to focus on, in my cold-medicated, slightly dazed state. I sorted the high priority e-mails by date and started at the bottom. After each response, I filed the e-mail under the appropriate course heading. I found that tackling this problem in this manner helped me stay focused on the priority e-mails without getting distracted by the less critical e-mails that were also waiting for me.

  Another trick helped me save time here. I knew that several of the student inquiries would be quite similar, one to another. I opened a text file on my desktop and copied my first response into it. As the like-type inquiries appeared, I just did a “copy/paste” of the original response and tweaked it to suit the specific concern. There were several themes in the inquiries and I found myself, at the end of the exercise, with several paragraphs of recycled information in my text file. I then crafted this into a full-scale announcement, with headers, that I posted on our online course site. After all, if one student has a question about something, it means that 9 others also did but didn’t get it together to ask! I’m convinced that doing this cut down on the volume of student inquiries later in the week.

These are a few of the ways I try to rein in the reign of e-mail. What are your best e-mail tricks? Care to share?

Posted in Communication, Managing Technology, Time Management
Tags: e-mail, e-mail management, e-mail triage, in-box, in-box management, in-box triage

Is Your Competency Still Core? Or Have You Given Away The Store?

Here’s a little something I’m noticing as a trend, particularly with businesses that possess both a “bricks” and “clicks” presence. The idea of “core competency” – the main product or service your business delivers and charges money for – is getting confused with “market differentiation” – the element that would cause a customer to select your business, service or product over your competitor’s. Confusion arises when the business owners/managers are blind to the fact that their market differentiation has evolved and rests upon their online customer interface rather than remaining closely aligned with their core competency.

Let me give you a mock case study to illustrate. Imagine you and your business partners have a passion for growing and distributing organic bamboo for use in a wide variety of products. You develop specialized facilities and soon are producing the highest quality organic bamboo available for use in clothing, household products and flooring. Your production facilities are close to your major markets. Business flourishes as demand for this new renewable raw material increases and you have proven to be able to deliver reliably. This is a very exciting time and you and your business partners are proud to be producing an environmentally-sound product that is so well-received.

Over time, you notice that the bulk of your orders are coming in through your web-based ordering system, something you hired a third-party to develop at start-up on a whim. It is stable and relatively error-free. Everyone in your company is focused on producing this top quality raw material and learning more and more about this product and what it can do. No one has been hired to, literally, mind the online store. No one “in-house” has developed, or been hired for, their technology expertise. After all, the online ordering interface is working fine, right? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Time passes and competitors begin to crowd your previously-lucrative market. Not surprising, really – if you can go out and learn about this product and invest in its production, so can they! Soon, your customers have a choice between six producers, each of whom can supply identical quality product and deliver it equally as reliably. Your core competency (high quality bamboo delivered reliably) is no longer differentiating you in the market. It is likely that your competitors will be trying to knock you off on price – but there is one other differentiator here. The online customer interface which, in your case, likely does not measure up to the interface developed by the more recent market entries. The newer sites provide faster interaction, the ability to repeat previous orders with a few clicks, and easier “sub and switch” options. A customer ordering with your competitor can do so in five minutes or less where the same order on your site can take 10 minutes or more.

Here is the thing that makes this trend really interesting to me: many businesses start out focused on their core competency and outsource their technology support, including their web presence. Conventional business wisdom suggests that it is possible to outsource all but your core competency. I would argue, based on what I have seen repeatedly over the past while, that companies that choose to outsource the element that becomes their market differentiation are in a deeply weakened competitive position.

I have three things to say about the tension between core competency and market differentiation:

Understand that market differentiation can shift. The paternal side of my family descends from generations of village butchers in rural England. My father, who became head of the meat department at Harrod’s before the age of 30, eventually traveled the world before settling in London, Ontario to open a butcher shop on Richmond Street. He knew his stuff – breeding, livestock, animal husbandry, care of meat products, preparing meat products … you name it.  If he were still alive in this more fast-paced age and suddenly observed his customers switching to the meat counter at Loblaw’s, he would be at a loss to respond, I think. He would be inclined to respond within his comfort zone, to do more of what he knew, but do it better. Higher quality, cleaner displays, more variety. This response, while admirable, would overlook what has become the market differentiation element now – convenience.  Of course, there has been another shift towards a niche market of “green” meats – organic, hormone-free meats. Dad might have been able to jump back in on this differentiator.

Know your business model. I mean, really know it. What are your customers paying for? Is your core competency really as strong as you think it is? Or is there some other distinguishing element – customer service, online access/interface, corporate culture/brand – that your customers are really paying for? When in doubt, ask! There is a multitude of online survey and polling tools ready to be deployed for this very purpose. Learning what makes your customers pick you over your competition may be critical to your long-term survival. Understand that the answers could change rapidly, depending on competitive forces.

Where technology has become a critical differentiator, acquire in-house expertise. You don’t need to develop an entire IT department – in fact, I still support the outsourcing of IT functions for most small and medium-sized enterprises. However, you need one senior person in-house who knows your business model inside-out, who knows your market, and who understands the critical elements of your technology infrastructure. This person needs to be able to represent YOUR critical business needs when managing your IT suppliers and needs to be able to speak “tech-speak” fluently enough to be able to negotiate and manage a portfolio of IT requirements. I have seen this go two ways. Either a non-technical manager becomes interested in the technological aspects and develops the experience and expertise, or a technical manager is hired and has to learn the business.  Ask yourself which is easier – learning about deployed and available technologies, or learning about your business?

Companies that let their outsourced IT suppliers “lead” their tech development without adequate in-house knowledge can face situations in which the solutions provided are deeply inadequate in terms of supporting core competency or delivering continued market differentiation. This is a costly outcome, both in terms of the simple bottom line ROI of a tech solution, and in terms of the potential loss of market share. If you feel too close to properly analyze where you stand in the tension between core competency, market differentiation and technology infrastructure, an unbiased third-party review might help.

Posted in Business Strategy, Entrepreneurial Strategy, Managing Technology, Technology
Tags: business model, core competency, differentiation, infrastructure, market differentiation, market forces, online customer interface, outsourcing, Technology

E-Mail Spoofing: Not For Faint of Heart

It was October 2, 2008 – the night of the one English debate scheduled here in Canada between our political leaders in our federal election campaign. It was, not coincidentally, also the night of the Vice-Presidential debate in the US which pitted the solid and stern Joe Biden against the folksy patronizing “charm” of Sarah Palin. The US debate held much more promise for drama than our five earnest and exceedingly polite political leaders.

Three of my fellow political junkies joined me at my place and offered to make home-made pizza to sustain us through a few hours of channel-hopping between these debates. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse!

We were glued to the set, providing our own commentary as things unfolded. At approximately the mid-point in the debates, about 10:00 p.m. EDT, my Blackberry started vibrating. And vibrating, And vibrating. I glanced at it and was horrified to see that hundreds – eventually thousands – of “bounce-back” error messages were being delivered to my e-mail in-box. You know the kind of message you get when you send an e-mail and have mistyped the address? You get a “Mailer-Daemon: Error” or “Unknown Recipient” or “Undeliverable” or some such. A bounce back.

What does it mean when hundreds or thousands of these bounce-backs appear in your e-mail in-box? It means that your e-mail address has just been spoofed. In other words, an e-mail spammer or their designated web-bot has somehow either catalogued your e-mail address from some source (your website, or someone’s address book online) or has simply randomly generated an address that matches yours. They then insert your address into their “Sender:” or “Reply-To:” fields in a spam message and then, to your consternation, they hit “send”. YOU get the bounce-backs – they don’t.

Your e-mail address also may get tagged by spam filters as being possible spam – not a good outcome if you rely on e-mails and have technologically savvy clients with whom you would like to reliably communicate.

There is also the matter of the thousands upon thousands of e-mails that come pouring into your in-box, effectively obliterating your ability to identify and respond to your REAL e-mails. At one point, in the middle of this spoofing storm, I was watching the e-mails pour into my web mail in-box and attempted to highlight masses of them and delete. I could not highlight and delete fast enough to keep up. I managed to delete over 1,000 messages from my mail server before bed, but by the time I shut my machine down, there were over 1,200 messages … and counting. When I got up in the morning, my in-box intake had slowed and there were a mere 6,177 messages. The flow had slowed to a trickle. Somewhere in there, I found out later, were two notes from students of mine and three personal messages of some importance.

I have three things to say about e-mail spoofing:

1. An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth … About Eight Ounces Of Cure: The standard admonishment for keeping your e-mail out of the hands of malevolent spammers is to suggest keeping your “real” e-mail address offline. Don’t use your most important e-mail address to sign up for distribution lists, or to enter online contests, or to interact with discussion boards, blogs, forums or wikis. Get a separate web-based e-mail address for these purposes (i.e. hotmail/gmail/yahoo or similar) and keep your corporate or “real” personal address for “real” correspondence.

I do endorse this as a strategy, but I also know there are times when you might want to use your corporate domain name online for marketing purposes. I also know that spammers are getting very clever about acquiring e-mail addresses from web-based address books, facebook, and other sources. To be honest, if you have been out in the virtual world with your main e-mail address at any point in the last 10 years, that e-mail address is likely on a list somewhere. If you haven’t been spoofed yet, you are living on borrowed time. Brace yourself.

2. Folder Filters. Here is one way you can “cope” with the coming onslaught of totally useless bounce-backs that may be headed your way. Note the subject line of most of these undeliverable message alerts. They contain unique words like:
   • Undeliverable
   • Daemon
   • Unknown recipient
   • Delivered

   … and so on. Set up your e-mail software with filters that recognize these words in the subject line and direct all incoming messages labelled as such into the appropriate folders. This can be set up either within your desktop e-mail progam (i.e. Outlook) or at your mail server. I would recommend that you set this up at the server level to keep this virtual riff-raff as far away from your own equipment as possible. I would also recommend you do this NOW and not wait until your in-box is groaning from the weight of incoming bounce-backs.

3. Create and Activate a Sender Policy Framework (SPF). What!? Another three-letter acronym? Yes – sorry. This one also takes a bit of fiddling to set up, but the end results are quite worth the effort. This link will explain the technical details, giving a blow-by-blow on how to set this up for either a corporate-owned domain or something like a gmail account.

What is a Sender Policy Framework? It is a tiny piece of programming that the owner of a domain name can, more or less, attach to the information about their domain name that is distributed to Domain Name Servers. Think of Domain Name Servers as giant digital phone books that are continuously self-replicating and updating at key points all across the Internet. If you own a domain name, say something like lizworks.com, your local DNS knows exactly where all the relevant files for that domain name are kept, and will automatically direct your browser there. Most domain owners also use their domain to direct their e-mail – and here is where the fun begins. Through an SPF, you can identify all the computers (by domain name) that are authorized to send e-mail FROM your domain. Let’s say you send mail from cogeco.ca at home, from your corporate domain name at work, and occasionally from gmail when you are traveling. You can set up an SPF that says to the DNS, “Look, if the e-mail you received from my domain came from one of these three places, it is legit. If it did NOT get sent from one of these three places, it did NOT come from me!” For specific details on how to implement this, please visit OpenSPF.org.

This is not a perfect solution and, certainly, companies with thousands of employees would find a simple policy like this to be restrictive. However, the more we can all adopt this sort of policy, the harder we are making it for the spammers to take advantage of our valuable virtual assets.

My two experiences with e-mail spoofing have shown me that it really is like a storm. My address was used for, I’m guessing, a single giant spam “send” and then the spammer moved on to the next name on their list. The bounce-backs do wind down, usually over a matter of days. However, untold damage was done in terms of my e-mail address now being listed – perhaps on the basis of more than one instance – as a potential spam source. Don’t let this happen to you – take a close look at the SPF approach and implement it if you can. Truly an ounce of prevention worth many pounds of cure.

Posted in Managing Technology, Technology
Tags: coping with an e-mail spoof, e-mail, e-mail spoofing, openspf.org, preventing e-mail spoofing, Sender Policy Framework, SPF, spoof