How can I sell this idea to my boss?
This is something that executive coaches hear regularly. It usually comes from someone seeking to lead from the middle. To begin to answer this question, let me tell you a story.
Ronald Reagan is credited with hastening the end of Cold War between the USSR and the USA. While he had long preached nuclear disarmament, his argument gained personal impetus after watching the made-for-TV movie, The Day After, which depicted the destruction of Lawrence, Kansas, after a nuclear blast. The movie, according to The Dead Hand, a recent history of the Cold War era by David Hoffman, left Reagan depressed for days and gave him even more resolve to seek nuclear banishment. Skeptics may scoff that it took a movie to influence the president, but as Hoffman explained on NPR's Fresh Air, movies helped to shape Reagan's world view.
Few managers who seek to influence upward have the resources to make a motion picture, but many managers have the cleverness and street smarts to craft an argument to win their cases. As I illustrate in my new book, Lead Your Boss, The Subtle Art of Managing Up, critical to developing a strong case is first and foremost to frame your argument according to the business case: why is it good sense for the organization to pursue your idea? Without a foundation based on either improving or saving the business, your idea has no chance; with it, you can begin.
To build upon your business case, you must frame your argument, in effect your sales pitch, in ways which appeal to the person with authority. Here's how.
1. Adopt your boss' point of view. Marshall Goldsmith taught me that if you want to influence the CEO then you need to see the world as he or she sees it. CEOs take a corporate-wide view of performance, of course, but each of them has hot button issues around products and services, employee morale, or their legacies. If you have a boss who's a cost-cutter, frame your pitch as a means of cutting costs, or at least reducing expenses. Likewise if you have a boss who is focused on customer issues — frame your pitch as a way to improve customer service or product benefits. The angle of your pitch depends upon the boss' interest.
2. Paint a picture. We saw how movies affected Reagan. Consider how your boss likes information. It may a straightforward spreadsheet or a narrative business plan. Do what makes sense but don't stop there. If your idea is big and bold, make it so by producing a video or using photographs. These options are effective when demonstrating customer concerns. A video of a customer expressing a desire or a concern about a product improvement or deficiency can be a powerful persuasive tool. If your initiative is about an internal improvement, interview end-users who will benefit from the adoption of your idea.
3. Make it come alive. When Eleanor Roosevelt was being courted by Franklin, she took him to the Lower East Side of New York City where she was doing relief work with the poor, chiefly immigrants. Taking the patrician Franklin in and out of decaying tenements opened his eyes to the fact that there was real poverty in the world. So to make your case, take your boss to the heart of the action. For example, if you are pushing for an improvement on the factory floor, bring him to the line and show him what you intend to do. Or if you want to demonstrate a customer need, invite the boss to a focus group with customers. There is nothing like real world examples to demonstrate your argument.
These steps to make your argument come alive do work, but they need something else — your credibility. If you want to lead up, you need to be perceived as competent. Therefore, it is more difficult to sell upward if you are brand new to your job, unless you were hired to do so (that is, shake things up with new ideas). Credibility is earned through example, especially by doing your job well over a period of time. Also, critical for those who manage in the middle, credibility is enhanced by the ability to collaborate with peers.
Pitching ideas upward and acting on them is essential to the process of leading up, which by nature is something that demands an ability to balance the big picture of what the organization needs with the day-to-day reality of what you do. When selling an idea to your superiors, even to the CEO, it is important to believe in your ability to effect positive change. Transformation may be sanctioned from on high, but it is men and women in the middle who make it become reality, and that is a persuasive case in itself.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Doo-Doo Economics - William H. Gross
The world is turning “green” – global warming or not. Electric cars, free-range chickens, and White House vegetable gardens are the wave of the future, but the defining badge of environmentalists may be none of those and might, in fact, be colored blue, as opposed to green. Dog owners would be the first to acknowledge it. Having converted reluctantly to felines nearly ten years ago, I myself am only forced to humble myself by emptying the litter box once or twice a year when Sue is visiting the relatives. But dogs? Well, Bowser has to be walked, and Bowser owners these days are being forced to subserviently follow in step, holding those little blue “doo-doo” bags at the ready that keep the neighbors’ grass green instead of brown and minimize the number of summer flies to a billion per square mile. No longer will the current generation be allowed to use pooper-scoopers; they must in fact be pooper “stoopers,” bending down, turning the bag inside out to form a glove, and then – EEECH – making the grass environmentally friendly again by picking it up, reversing the bag and hurriedly looking for the nearest neighbor’s garbage can who might conveniently be at church or shopping at the grocery store. One can only hope that Fido is mildly constipated, if you get my drift. I can recall the diaper days with my three kids. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but those non-environmentally friendly Pampers at least afforded one-stop dropping – easy on, easy off – no touchy, no feely. In those days, a doggie bag was something you asked for in a fine restaurant to take home the steak bones. Now it’s a blue plastic reminder that the world is changing and in many respects our daily routine is becoming a dog’s life.
A similar metaphor could be applied to the 45 million citizens of the State of California. Once “golden” and the land of entrepreneurial opportunity, the state has turned from filet mignon to ground chuck and its residents are now on a short leash as opposed to masters of their own universe. Unemployment at 12.2% is near the nation’s highest and its Baa bond rating is the country’s lowest. Its schools are abysmal, competing with Louisiana and Mississippi for the lowest rating in the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. While the air is much cleaner than it was 20 years ago, the freeways are stereotypically jammed and increasingly less free – the age of the toll road serving the exasperated (or simply the Mercedes owners) is upon us.
Our canine existence has many fathers. Perhaps more than any other state, California has been affected by its perverted form of government, requiring a two-thirds vote by state legislators to effectively pass a budget. In addition, the state’s laws are almost tragically shaped by a form of direct democracy more resemblant of the Jacksonian era, where the White House furniture was constantly at risk due to unruly citizens, high on whisky, and low on morals and common sense. Propositions from conservatives and liberals alike have locked up much of the budget, with Proposition 13 in 1978 reducing property taxes by 57% and Prop. 98 in 1988 requiring 40% of the general fund to be spent on schools. Recently, much of any excess has been gobbled not only by teachers, but unbelievably by a prison lobby that would be the envy of any on Washington’s K Street.
The result has been a $26 billion deficit that was supposedly “closed” in recent weeks, but which largely was a “kick the can” accounting scheme that postponed the pain, or better yet, pled for a federal solution to self-inflicted wounds. State budgets of course are required to be balanced each year, but that has long been a fiction throughout most of the country. Still, California’s 2009 fix was perhaps the longest kick of the can in history, refusing effectively to raise taxes, superficially cutting expenses, and shaming its fading image by refusing to disburse required billions to local counties and communities, as well as using accounting tricks that couldn’t fool a grade-schooler. In the process, they managed to reinvent the IOU, paying bills in virtual scrip that then traded at substantial discounts on eBay of all places. They have issued tax anticipation notes of all sorts with a multitude of lettered configurations that anagram aficionados would revel in. Just last week the state extended its begging bowl for $8 billion of “RANs” (Revenue Anticipation Notes) at an onerous money market rate of 1 1⁄2%. Previously they had issued “RAWs” (Revenue Anticipation Warrants). “BAGs” might be next – blue BAGS, that is, full of the doo-doo that California citizens have grown used to picking up.
There are signs that California voters are ready to make some tough choices, having recently refused to pass five propositions that would have extended tax hikes and failed to address spending. Whether or not Governor Schwarzenegger and legislators will agree to a constitutional convention to address the poisonous proposition plebiscite itself is a larger question that will likely be affirmatively answered only if the state economy continues to remain in the tank, which it likely will. But California’s problems, while somewhat unique and self-inflicted, are really America’s problems, and not just because the California economy is 15% of national GDP. While California’s $26 billion deficit is not directly comparable to the federal gap of $1 trillion-plus, they both reflect a lack of discipline and indeed vision to perceive that the strong growth in revenues was driven by the same excess leverage and the same delusionary asset appreciation that was bound to approach cliff’s edge. California’s property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes were all artificially elevated by national and indeed global imbalances as the U.S. manufactured paper, and Asia manufactured things in mercantilistic exchange. Total tax revenues have actually fallen 14% over the past 12 months in California and substantially more in other states. At some point, that Fantasyland merry-go-round had to stop and whether the defining moment was marked by Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, or the tumultuous week that followed in September of 2008 is really not the point.
What is critical to recognize is that both California and the U.S., as well as numerous global lookalikes such as the U.K., Spain, and Eastern European invalids, are in a poor position to compete in a global economy where capitalism is morphing from its decades-long emphasis on finance and levered risk taking to a more conservative, regulated, production-oriented system advantaged by countries focusing on thrift and deferred gratification. The term “capitalism” itself speaks to “capital” – the accumulation of it and the eventual efficient employment of it – for growth in profits and real wages alike.
What California once had and is losing rapidly is its “capital”: unquestionably in its ongoing double-digit billion dollar deficits, but also in its crown jewel educational system that led to Silicon Valley miracles such as Hewlett Packard, Apple, Google, and countless other new age innovators. In addition, its human capital is beginning to exit as more people move out of the state than in. While the United States as a whole has yet to suffer that emigration indignity, the same cannot be said for foreign-born and U.S.-educated scientists and engineers who now choose to return to their homelands to seek opportunity. Lady Liberty’s extended hand offering sanctuary to other nations’ “tired, poor and huddled masses” may be limited to just that. The invigorated wind up elsewhere.
Now that our financial system has been stabilized, one wonders whether California’s “Governator” and indeed the Obama Administration has the capital, the vision, and indeed the discipline of its citizenry to turn things around. Our future doggie bags can hold steak bones or doo-doo of an increasingly familiar smell. For now investors should be holding their noses, their risk orientation, as well as their blue bags, until proven otherwise. Specifically that continues to dictate a focus on high quality bonds and steady dividend paying stocks that can survive, if not thrive, in our journey to a “new normal” economy of slower growth, muted profit gains, and potential capital destruction via default, abrogation of property rights, and dollar devaluation.
A similar metaphor could be applied to the 45 million citizens of the State of California. Once “golden” and the land of entrepreneurial opportunity, the state has turned from filet mignon to ground chuck and its residents are now on a short leash as opposed to masters of their own universe. Unemployment at 12.2% is near the nation’s highest and its Baa bond rating is the country’s lowest. Its schools are abysmal, competing with Louisiana and Mississippi for the lowest rating in the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. While the air is much cleaner than it was 20 years ago, the freeways are stereotypically jammed and increasingly less free – the age of the toll road serving the exasperated (or simply the Mercedes owners) is upon us.
Our canine existence has many fathers. Perhaps more than any other state, California has been affected by its perverted form of government, requiring a two-thirds vote by state legislators to effectively pass a budget. In addition, the state’s laws are almost tragically shaped by a form of direct democracy more resemblant of the Jacksonian era, where the White House furniture was constantly at risk due to unruly citizens, high on whisky, and low on morals and common sense. Propositions from conservatives and liberals alike have locked up much of the budget, with Proposition 13 in 1978 reducing property taxes by 57% and Prop. 98 in 1988 requiring 40% of the general fund to be spent on schools. Recently, much of any excess has been gobbled not only by teachers, but unbelievably by a prison lobby that would be the envy of any on Washington’s K Street.
The result has been a $26 billion deficit that was supposedly “closed” in recent weeks, but which largely was a “kick the can” accounting scheme that postponed the pain, or better yet, pled for a federal solution to self-inflicted wounds. State budgets of course are required to be balanced each year, but that has long been a fiction throughout most of the country. Still, California’s 2009 fix was perhaps the longest kick of the can in history, refusing effectively to raise taxes, superficially cutting expenses, and shaming its fading image by refusing to disburse required billions to local counties and communities, as well as using accounting tricks that couldn’t fool a grade-schooler. In the process, they managed to reinvent the IOU, paying bills in virtual scrip that then traded at substantial discounts on eBay of all places. They have issued tax anticipation notes of all sorts with a multitude of lettered configurations that anagram aficionados would revel in. Just last week the state extended its begging bowl for $8 billion of “RANs” (Revenue Anticipation Notes) at an onerous money market rate of 1 1⁄2%. Previously they had issued “RAWs” (Revenue Anticipation Warrants). “BAGs” might be next – blue BAGS, that is, full of the doo-doo that California citizens have grown used to picking up.
There are signs that California voters are ready to make some tough choices, having recently refused to pass five propositions that would have extended tax hikes and failed to address spending. Whether or not Governor Schwarzenegger and legislators will agree to a constitutional convention to address the poisonous proposition plebiscite itself is a larger question that will likely be affirmatively answered only if the state economy continues to remain in the tank, which it likely will. But California’s problems, while somewhat unique and self-inflicted, are really America’s problems, and not just because the California economy is 15% of national GDP. While California’s $26 billion deficit is not directly comparable to the federal gap of $1 trillion-plus, they both reflect a lack of discipline and indeed vision to perceive that the strong growth in revenues was driven by the same excess leverage and the same delusionary asset appreciation that was bound to approach cliff’s edge. California’s property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes were all artificially elevated by national and indeed global imbalances as the U.S. manufactured paper, and Asia manufactured things in mercantilistic exchange. Total tax revenues have actually fallen 14% over the past 12 months in California and substantially more in other states. At some point, that Fantasyland merry-go-round had to stop and whether the defining moment was marked by Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, or the tumultuous week that followed in September of 2008 is really not the point.
What is critical to recognize is that both California and the U.S., as well as numerous global lookalikes such as the U.K., Spain, and Eastern European invalids, are in a poor position to compete in a global economy where capitalism is morphing from its decades-long emphasis on finance and levered risk taking to a more conservative, regulated, production-oriented system advantaged by countries focusing on thrift and deferred gratification. The term “capitalism” itself speaks to “capital” – the accumulation of it and the eventual efficient employment of it – for growth in profits and real wages alike.
What California once had and is losing rapidly is its “capital”: unquestionably in its ongoing double-digit billion dollar deficits, but also in its crown jewel educational system that led to Silicon Valley miracles such as Hewlett Packard, Apple, Google, and countless other new age innovators. In addition, its human capital is beginning to exit as more people move out of the state than in. While the United States as a whole has yet to suffer that emigration indignity, the same cannot be said for foreign-born and U.S.-educated scientists and engineers who now choose to return to their homelands to seek opportunity. Lady Liberty’s extended hand offering sanctuary to other nations’ “tired, poor and huddled masses” may be limited to just that. The invigorated wind up elsewhere.
Now that our financial system has been stabilized, one wonders whether California’s “Governator” and indeed the Obama Administration has the capital, the vision, and indeed the discipline of its citizenry to turn things around. Our future doggie bags can hold steak bones or doo-doo of an increasingly familiar smell. For now investors should be holding their noses, their risk orientation, as well as their blue bags, until proven otherwise. Specifically that continues to dictate a focus on high quality bonds and steady dividend paying stocks that can survive, if not thrive, in our journey to a “new normal” economy of slower growth, muted profit gains, and potential capital destruction via default, abrogation of property rights, and dollar devaluation.
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