How Aristotle Can Help You Sell Better

[This article originally appeared on the American Express Open Forum]

I was recently in the market for a new car. I had narrowed down my list of prospects and went out for some test drives. At the car dealerships, each sales person immediately jumped enthusiastically into sharing the features and functions of the cars. “It has cruise control, alloy wheels, and a cup holder.” Exciting. Interestingly, the same thing happened when I was looking to purchase some software. The sales person recited a well-rehearsed script. “Our software will allow you to keep a record of every customer.” My reaction: “Um, and so can all your competitors.” In both cases, I was uninspired and unmotivated to buy.

This got me thinking about the selling process.

Your ability to sell is fundamental to your success. Maybe you want customers to buy a product or service that you offer. Or maybe, as a leader in an organization, you might want your employees to embrace the latest management technique to help spur innovation.

Regardless of what you are selling, from my experience, most people sell incorrectly.

When you focus your selling strategy on features and functions, it positions you as a commodity. It is well-known that people buy more often for emotional rather than logical reasons. So why are you starting the sales process with logic?

A more effective way to sell involves a simple three-step process: ethos, pathos, and then logos. Just in case your Greek is a little rusty, ethos, pathos, and logos are the three corners of Aristotle’s “Rhetorical Triangle” – the use of language to persuade. Ethos is credibility, pathos is empathy, and logos is logic.

Selling your ideas using this construction, in that order, leads to more persuasive arguments.

Read the rest of this article on the American Express OPEN Forum

How To Motivate Innovators

Organizations use a variety of tools to motivate employees to participate in their innovation efforts.

The most common form of motivation involves compensation via a points system.  When you contribute an idea, solution, comment or vote, you get points – much like American Express Membership Rewards points – that can be used to buy a variety of items: company T-shirts, mugs, and other “exciting” things.  For some reason this reminds me of the arcade games like skeeball where you would win tickets that could be exchanged for wonderful items like fake vampire fangs or rubber spiders.

Some companies have taken the concept a bit further and allowed people to accumulate points that can be used in auctions.  Once a month the company holds an auction for a trip to, say, Tahiti.  Anyone with points can join the bidding.  This encourages people to earn and save as many points as possible so that they can have a chance at some really big prizes.  This supposedly stimulates contributions to innovation.

A third model that doesn’t necessarily need a points system involves “priceless” awards.  Remember the Mastercard commercials?  These are items that you can’t buy with money: dinner with the CEO, a prime parking space or an extra week of vacation.  These types of prizes are particularly enticing because no amount of money can buy them

The thing that these three models have in common is that the prize is tangible.  Some might call it an extrinsic form of motivation.  Chip Conley, author of Peak, might point out that these are the lowest rung of motivations on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food and shelter/safety and security.

There is an opportunity for other, potentially more effective forms of motivation.

At the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy (going back to Conley’s concept), you will find self-actualization.  In the innovation/business world, this is where “the work is its own reward.” The open source software movement was largely built on this model.  Millions of people have helped develop software without any formal extrinsic compensation. Many do it just because it feels good to contribute.  For some, it is about building software that will bring down the “evil empire” (aka Microsoft).

Although this is an incredibly effective motivator for many, this is difficult to put into practice inside of a “typical” organization.  Ok, when I worked for a Formula 1 team, people there truly love their work because they were fans of the sport.  But this is usually the exception, not the rule.  At least from my experience.

Between food & shelter and self-actualization lies the most under-utilized form of motivation: peer recognition.  This can be extremely effective, especially inside of organizations where “intelligence” is highly valued.  Pharmaceutical companies, R&D departments, and NASA come to mind off the top of my head.

For some individuals, being recognized by their peers is the highest form of motivation.  In come circles, being published in a peer reviewed journal is an incredible honor.

Therefore find ways of recognizing people, especially when it involves peer recognition.

One way to do this if you use a points system like the ones described above, is to create a leader board.  This creates a friendly competition and helps individuals stand out from the crowd based on their contributions.

Another approach, of course, is to develop a good recognition program as part of your communication plans.  Many companies do this, but they rarely do it well.  Here’s the real opportunity…

Stop recognizing people for doing their job. When you hire someone to work for you, it should be expected that they are competent.  When you recognize people for doing what they are hired to do, it reinforces a “culture” where the status quo is good enough.

Instead, recognize (and reward) people for going beyond their job; for doing things that are unexpected.

If you want to encourage open innovation or cross-business unit collaboration, then recognize people for that.  If you want employees to take risks, make a big deal out of individuals who do that.  If you want to let people know that failure is ok – when done the right way – then promote situations where something didn’t work as planned yet powerful lessons were learned and risk was mitigated risk.

Define what your organization values and then reward on that.

Culture is sometimes defined as “a network of conversations.” What they say to each other and what they think to themselves.  Shift the conversations and you begin to shift the culture.  These types of programs are a great opportunity to create an environment of innovation and promote the values/conversations you want to instill.

The Four Principles of Personality Poker

We will be releasing a series of videos about Personality Poker over the coming weeks.  Each will talk about a specific concept or insight from the book.  You can pre-order the book now.  Each book comes with a deck of the specially designed poker cards which will be demonstrated in the next video.  Enjoy!

Open Innovation @NASA

I am speaking at TRIZCON tomorrow. The opening speaker today was Jeffrey Davis, MD, Director of Space Life Sciences at NASA Johnson Space Center. His excellent presentation focused primarily on the open innovation efforts of NASA.

Here are some of the key soundbites I heard…

• They wanted to avoid the “serendipity” associated with many innovation efforts, and to create something more predictable.
• Alliances are THE key to open innovation. Another one is to use the platforms as a way of “managing a network of networks.”
• He quoted Karim Lakhani from Harvard who once said, “No matter who you are, the smartest people work for someone else.”
• He said that “putting a call for solutions to the open innovation channels was easy.” But there was a psychological barrier to admitting they couldn’t find the answers themselves.
• Part of the reason why their efforts were so successful is that they did their homework. They determined which open innovation venue was most appropriate for each challenge. He referred to an article written by Gary Pisano in HBR (you can read an excerpt here).
• NASA is using three organizations for their open innovation efforts: InnoCentive, Yet2, and Topcoder.

InnoCentive Challenges

Davis spent a large part of his hour talking about InnoCentive. He described them as a “turnkey solution” because challenge writing, vetting and other activities are done by them, reducing the amount of work to be done by NASA. Their InnoCentive challenges yielded responses from people in 65 countries and had a solve rate of about 50%.  He described a few InnoCentive challenges that they ran. Here are three where he had some interesting commentary:

Solar activity cause problems for space travel. If an astronaut is doing a walk during a flare, it can be incredibly dangerous. Therefore they ran a challenge to predict such activity. But instead of posting it as a solar activity challenge, they posed it as a mathematical modeling issue. This broadened the possible sphere of solutions and solution providers. The success criteria for the solution was that the model would need to provide prediction within 24 hours of the solar activity, it needed to be 50% accurate, and within 2 sigma (a quality measure where the higher the number the better). The solution was provided by a retired engineer whose model predicted within 8 hours, was 70% accurate and within 3 sigma. This was a huge improvement over their initial expectations.

Because space travel can last for years, they have a problem with food spoilage. Therefore they ran a challenge to find a food packaging materials that could keep food fresh for 3 years. They found a solution from someone without food experience in Russia who developed a graphite-based material that appears to keep food fresher than regular materials.

Davis indicated that their “micro gravity laundry system” challenge was the least successful. There were two lessons from this. 1) Asking a “system” question was too complex and it should have been deconstructed into smaller challenges (e.g., a valve challenge). 2) Maybe a “higher level” question should be asked. For example, how do we eliminate the need for clothes laundering altogether?

His comments confirmed a few things for me:

• The laundry challenge highlights two keep points: asking a question that is too abstract leads to fluffy solutions, and asking the wrong question leads to irrelevant solutions.
• The food packaging and solar flare challenges show that solutions often come from disciplines than are different than where you would traditionally look.
• There is no one size fits all solution for open innovation. Different challenges require different approaches.

If you want to see my presentation to NASA last year, you can watch it here.

Read our Change This Manifesto

Today, the good folks at ChangeThis.com published my Personality Poker manifesto.  It is a quick read that will provide you some of my thoughts on why organizations struggle to become innovative…and what can be done about it.

Read it/download it here

Here’s the excerpt that Change This included on their website…

Issue 75 – 01 | Personality Poker: How to Create High-Performing Innovation Teams
By Stephen M. Shapiro Published Oct. 6, 2010 12:00 a.m.

“The desire for equality permeates everything we do and always has, as can be seen in many of our age-old philosophies. For example, we see it in the Golden Rule, which is often interpreted as ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’ However, who really cares what you want? After all, treating people as you want to be treated doesn’t address the needs and desires of others.

Buying into these doctrines, myths, and lies leads to pasteurizing, homogenizing, and sanitizing everyone in order to fit people into one mold and think the same way so they can then gather together in like-minded harmony. There’s a good reason why they call it a company culture, since organizations are, in actuality, mini-cults. Instead, we should consider living by the doctrine:

The person you like the least may be the person you need the most.”

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