Last week I was at a Communications Media Managers Association (CMMA) event in Plano, TX (not too far from Dallas, TX). The keynote speaker for the event was BJ Fogg a Stanford University professor who talked about “Hot Triggers & Rituals The New World of Persuasion.” There were some technical difficulties which delayed his presentation which I know rushed him and didn’t allow him to get through all of the content he wanted to present.

The best example I think he gave was of Oil of Olay which required him to do morning and nightly treatments to help “fight wrinkles”. He was noticing he wasn’t remembering to apply the treatment consistently, he would either apply in the morning or at night but often forgot to do both each day. He then told himself “I need a trigger to remind me to do it twice each day.” Like most Americans, he brushes he teeth twice a day, once in the morning, and once at night. Therefore to help remind him to apply the treatments he put the treatments in the sink where he normally brushes his teeth. That way he had to physically look at and remove the product from the sink before he could do anything else (it was a trigger/reminder).

His theory is essentially people need a reminder (a trigger) to do things and there are a number of circumstances which can either promote or prevent a task from being done. You can see his research at http://behaviorgrid.org/. Below are my notes from the meeting:

• Started by talking about how it is best when you can automate persuasion.
• Types of Behavior changes:
  • One time
  • Fixed period
  • From now on

• Core motivators
  • Pleasure/Pain
  • Hope/Fear
  • Social Rejection/Social Acceptance
• Simplicity has 6 elements
  • Time
  • Money
  • Physical effort
  • Brain cycles
  • Social deviance
  • Non routine
    • Each person has difference resources. These vary by context.
    • Simplicity is a function of your scariest resource at that moment.
• Motivation, ability, and trigger must be present at the same time otherwise if one is missing, the behavior will not occur

• You can increase a person’s ability by simplifying, not by training
  • Put “hot triggers” in the path of motivated people (hot triggers are when users can take immediate action on something that reminds them to do something)
    • New triggers if successful lead to new rituals which leads to new platforms (Facebook…Farmville etc)

• Best Buy got rid of “time and place” for workers.
• They no longer dictate work hours or workplace…where you have to work.
• They create outcome based goals for what each employee must achieve. It unleashed a whole new envelope of innovation of morale with those workers which allowed them to drive high level performance we’ve seen with Best Buy.
• Customizing workplace to meet employee needs. Provide flexibility to employees on flexibility and freedom while holing employees accountable for goals and objectives.

I collect magazines like they are going out of style.  At home I have a huge stack of them on my coffee table, some unread and some read.  I did some traveling down to Dallas, TX today for a Communications event over the next few days and took a handful of magazines down with me while on the plane.  One of the magazines I took was Fast Company December 2008 which featured John Chambers, Cisco’s infamous CEO.  I really enjoyed it and the below are my favorite excepts from that article.

• “The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives. This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world. “In 2001, we were like most high-tech companies, with one or two primary products that were really important to us,” he explains. “All decisions came to the top 10 people in the company, and we drove things back down from there.” Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos.
• Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.
• Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye.
• “We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know,” he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory.
• The open-source nature of the culture has yielded a litany of surprising results. For instance, while PCs are the official desktop hardware at Cisco, Mac users in the company have created their own unofficial help desk using the company’s social tools, outside the official purview of the IT department. Mitchell’s team created its own “rogue deployment,” as he puts it, called C-Vision, a YouTube inside the firewall that has become one of the company’s most popular communication tools. Most of the videos are short product reports, sales ideas, and engineering updates, all created deskside and published directly to the network with the click of a mouse. No filter, no lawyers. It is a petri dish for ideas and exchange.
• “We are always looking for the applications that help people really have water-cooler talk, something that we thought was impossible in a global business”
• In the company’s old “cowboy culture,” strong personalities were rewarded for jostling one another out of the way to get Chambers’s approval. After he launched the reorganization into boards and councils, “there were times when everyone, even the CEO, was very uncomfortable,” he admits. The internal economy of the old Cisco was very much market based. Chambers chose to redistribute the wealth: Executives are now compensated on how well the collective of businesses performs, not their own individual product units. (Playing well with others is also an increasingly important part of rank-and-file employees’ performance reviews.)
• Chambers wants nothing less than a total redesign of the corporation as we know it. Starting at the top: “You won’t have to depend on the CEO anymore.” About those Cisco execs who left, he says he came to realize that “some people need a command-and-control environment.” But that’s not the way of the future: “We now have a whole pool of talent who can lead these working groups, like mini CEOs and COOs. We’re growing ideas, but we’re growing people as well.” In fact, he says, “where I might have had two potential successors, I now have 500.”
• “I now compensate our leadership team based on how well they do on collaboration and the longer-term picture,” Chambers says. “If we take the focus off of how they did today, this week, this quarter, it will work.”
• But Ricci admits, “I think that culture is really a reflection of the CEO personality.” Ricci believes that Cisco’s guideline for collaboration is a great way to run a company and build a great workforce, “but only if it is what the CEO believes, that this is how people should behave.”

>> Read the full article

I liked this Inc.com article on training young entrepreneurs one lemonaide stand at a time.

The boss drives people; the leader coaches them. The boss depends on authority; the leader on good will. The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm. The boss says ‘I’; the leader says ‘we.’ The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown. The boss says ‘go’; the leader says ‘let’s go!’” -H. Gordon Selfridge, American-British retail magnate

“I see a lot of brands talking about experimentation.  I think you’re either in or you’re not. When you’re in, you better dive in all the way.” – Erin Nelson, Chief Marketing Officer at Dell