Your Brain on Multitasking

"Every result in your life and in your business has a system that is perfect for creating it. If you want to change a result you have to develop a new system."

 - Steve Chandler

What Multitasking Does To Your Brain

By: Drake Baer

In case we needed another reason to close the 15 extra browser tabs we have open, Clifford Nass, a communication professor at Stanford, has provided major motivation for monotasking: according to his research, the more you multitask, the less you're able to learn, concentrate, or be nice to people.

Our brains are plastic but they're not elastic.

For a case study, turn to your nearest broadcast news station (and don't say Fast Company didn't warn you): if the talking head on the screen is accompanied by a "crawler" at the bottom blurbing baseball scores and the day's tragedies, you'll be less likely to remember whatever the pundit is saying. Why? Because, research shows that the more you're multitasking, the less you're able to filter out irrelevant information.

As Nass told NPR, if you think you're good at multitasking, you aren't:

. . . We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. 

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And . . . they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Multitasking rewires our brains.

When we multitask all day, those scattered habits literally change the pathways in our brains. The consequence, according to Nass' research, is that sustaining your attention becomes impossible.

"If we [multitask] all the time--brains are remarkably plastic, remarkably adaptable," he says, referencing neuroplasticity, the way the structures of your brain literally re-form to the patterns of your thought. "We train our brains to a new way of thinking. And then when we try to revert our brains back, our brains are plastic but they're not elastic. They don't just snap back into shape."

How it Affects Our Work

As James O'Toole notes on the strategy+business blog, the dangers of multitasking are as multifarious as they are nefarious.

Multitasking stunts emotional intelligence: Instead of addressing the person in front of you, you address a text message.

Multitasking makes us worse managers: The more we multitask, the worse we are at sorting through information--recall the broadcast news kerfuffle above.

Multitasking makes us less creative: Since attention is the midwife of creativity, if you can't focus, that thought-baby isn't coming out.

My Experience:

This is why the practice or habit of blocking time on your calendar, committing to that time, focusing on one Rock/Task/Action for that hour produces 3 times the results of multitasking. It seems you will also be nicer!

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

The Art of No

"You can do anything -- but not everything." 
 - David Allen

"It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much.

- Steve Jobs  

The great time management guru David Allen has nailed a profound truth here. We don't have time to do everything we want to do today. If you have any kind of success at all going on in your life, that will be your reality: more to do than time allows. Celebrate that. Then go warrior on your list and DELETE and/or DELEGATE as many items as you can. It's what you say NO to that creates your focus and pathway to an invented future. Not what you keep saying YES to all day in a vain attempt to please others and get them to like you and think you are accommodating. Accommodate the future.

Live well and prosper,
Steve Chandler

My Experience
You can't find the time to do important things that will create your future and help you reach your goals - you have to make the time. Say "no" to many things and block hours during the week to commit and focus your attention to Rocks/Important things that will move you and your company along. Treat these appointments with yourself like they are with your biggest customer and don't move them. Why do you get so much done on a Saturday morning? Because you can focus and work uninterrupted. Like my attorney client Chuck Beinhauer said, "I've got it now, I now make Tuesday morning my Saturday morning."

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

69 Percent of Employed Are Job Hunting

"The best people are working for someone else."  

I don't know who said that but they are 95% right. He/She who have the best people have the best company.

"Best" means they not only have the right skills but share the culture, core values and core purpose of your company as well as are accountable for results, not simply being busy.

Survey: 69 Percent of Employed Are Job Hunting
So this survey cuts both ways - 69% of your people are open to a move. The best may be looking because you let the others get by and they see it every day and ask themselves "why doesn't the boss do something about them?"

But it also shows that there are people out there, that if you are always recruiting, are willing to go on your Virtual Bench and be there when you are ready to hire. Keep your eyes and ears open all the time. Block an hour a week to doing something that involves recruiting "A Players" for your bench.

If you have a bench of "A Players" ready, it makes it a lot easier to let the "C Players" you have now go. You can replace them knowing you don't have to do a recruiting blitz, something that takes a lot of time, we dread and usually rush to get a body on board.  

Write down each of your employees names and ask yourself the Netflix question:

If he/she walked in tomorrow and said they were leaving in two weeks to go to work for a competitor, "how hard would I fight to keep them?"

I'll bet it would be a relief to you if one or two did that. If so they need to be replaced but you probably don't do it because you think about having to find someone else and you dread recruiting. Do it a little at a time - always be recruiting - will solve this issue and 69% of the people employed are open to a change.

Survey Results

75% of working-age Americans are "job seekers" - they're currently looking for or open to a new job - according to an online survey of more than 2,100 people by the hiring software company Jobvite.  

Among the employed respondents to the 2012 Social Job Seeker Survey, 69 percent said they were either "actively seeking" a new job or "open to" a new job. That number is up from 61 percent in Jobvite's 2011 survey.  

"Job seekers ... intuitively know that the best opportunities are found through people, not search engines," Finnigan told Forbes. "As social networking has become a core part of our cultural dynamic, we are continuing to see more and more job hunters taking advantage of a vertical they are comfortable with in order to find work."

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

Why Profit is a lot like Sex

Why Profit is a Lot Like Sex

By Peter Rowe

Profit is a lot like sex. Everyone thinks there's a lot more of it than there really is - and that someone else is getting their share. And that's just among business owners!

 

What do your people know about profit?

Many employees have even more bizarre ideas about profit. Those range from the downright naive who think that "sales income" and "profit" are one and the same, to the relatively educated who think they know how much profit their enterprise makes but are unaware of (or ignore) the less obvious cost factors that must be met from it.

Those cost factors include depreciation, interest, taxation, finance, amortisation and accruals, all of which draw from initial profits and must be accounted for to arrive at a true measure of what the business actually made over and above the sum total of all of its costs.

Even when the relatively sophisticated know the true profit figure, it is unlikely that they look at it in the context of its destiny: to be retained by the enterprise for its future expansion, safety, or security; or to be disbursed to its shareholders as dividends in exchange for the use of the capital they provide to allow the enterprise to exist and function.

Profit matters because, in the game of business that as leaders we ask our people to play with us, our profit is our score for the game! It's the proof of how well we are playing! So, if you want your people to play their best, would it not be wise (preferably at some early point in the game) to educate them to understand the score so that they can protect and promote it on a day-to-day basis?

Planning for profit

Why might such a day-to-day focus be important?

Because profit is generated on a day-to-day basis, and it is eroded on a day-to-day basis. If there is an inadequate level of day-to-day profit awareness among your people, then a profit is unlikely to accidentally materialise on a Profit and Loss statement at the end of a month, quarter or financial year.

If profit is not planned, monitored and protected, it seldom just happens - and never happens consistently!

So, how do we build a sufficient degree of profit awareness into every one of our people without making the enterprise, and the roles and activities within it, "just about the money"?   

Educating for profit
We could start by educating our people about just what profit is so that we can have an open, informed and intelligent discussion about our joint responsibility to generate one!

If this is a little radical - if you feel a little exposed or threatened by the prospect of your people knowing how much your enterprise is making - it may help to realise that in the absence of correct information or real data, your people are going to make it up anyway! They will come up with their own ideas as to what the enterprise is making, and those ideas are usually way north of the actual amount that the enterprise makes.    

So what? What harm can come from uninformed speculation?

Quite a lot, in fact, for if people feel that their enterprise is already profitable enough (by their often-modest standards), then they are unlikely to feel motivated to put in the extra effort or to do the extra yards. "After all, we're doin' alright, aren't we?"

Even worse, if, in their unknowingness, they think that the enterprise is unacceptably profitable by their measure! That has the potential to introduce doubts for them about the ethics, fairness or social values of the enterprise, and it can seriously erode their motivation and performance.

How to Teach about Profit

By Rick Wallace

The first step is to get your team together and hand out a piece of paper and a pencil to each person. Ask them to write on that piece of paper the % of Net Profit - the profit we earn here before we pay taxes and interest to keep it simple.

Take up the papers and read them to the group - from my experience most everyone will be north of 30%.

Now show them the real number for your last 12 months. Let's say it is 10% and you sold $1 million dollars for the purposes of this exercise. Your cost of goods sold was 55%, your labor costs were 23%, your expenses were 12%.

Now hand out $1 in change to everyone in dimes, nickels and pennies that will allow you to match the up with the next step.

Tell them that that $1 represents our sales last year.

Then ask them to give you 55 cents back. Explain that is what it costs you to buy the things you sold. Cost of Good Sold.

Now ask them to hand you another 23 cents. That is for the salaries, benefits, etc. Your total cost of labor.

Now ask them for another 12 cents. This is for the heat, rent, supplies, etc. The operating expenses.

Now they have 10 cents left. Ask them to give you 4 cents back for taxes.

Now they have 6 cents left. Ask them to give you 3 cents for the new trucks and computers you bought last year.

Now ask then to give you 2 cents for the interest you pay on the line of credit.

They have 1 cent left - we have to put that in the bank to try and build up some money so we don't have to use the line of credit next month.

Of course your numbers and situation will be different but I think you get the drift. It is easy to do and you will see a much different attitude about the business from the team going forward.

Next step - begin to show them how what they do individually everyday effects the profit of the company.

 

All the best, 

Rick Wallace

Are Sales Commissions Really A Winning Strategy?

"I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard."

- Estee Lauder

 

Below is an excerpt from the book, To Sell Is Human, by Daniel H. Pink:

Some things in life we know are true. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an outside force. And the best way to motivate salespeople is by offering them commissions.

Well maybe like Jim Rogers says, "It is when everyone knows something is right that it turns out to be wrong."

So it is with Commission = Sales.  

Everyone knows: Salespeople are only incented by money and the more they rely on commission, the more they sell!

Not so fast. New scientific and practical studies have found this not to be true in most cases.  

1. Commissions can actually retard sales - 90% of people have a point where more money is not a motivator. They reach that level of earning and time off, family and free time are more important than more money so they slow down and sell less.
2. Teamwork is what we want and traditionally sales has always been the problem. Everyone knows the sales people get commission and become jealous every time a big order comes in. Commissions are the cause of a lot of friction and the main deterrent to teamwork in your company.

But what if we're wrong, at least about that last one? What if paying salespeople commissions is rooted more in tradition than logic? What if it's a practice so cemented into orthodoxy that it's no longer an actual decision? That's what a handful of companies have begun discovering. To the surprise of many, these firms are showing that commissions can sometimes do more harm than good - and that getting rid of them can open a path to higher profits.

Though this may seem counterintuitive, scientific research on human motivation backs it up. For the past 30 years, a group of social scientists around the world - from pioneers like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, at the University of Rochester, to a new generation of scholars such as Adam Grant, at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School - have articulated a more subtle view of what motivates people in a variety of settings, including work.

One of their findings is that the effectiveness of motivators varies with the task. In particular, they have discovered that contingent rewards - I call them "if then" rewards, as in "If you do this, then you get that" - work well with routine tasks social scientists dub "algorithmic." Think stuffing envelopes quickly or turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line. The promise of a reward, especially cash, excites our attention, and we focus narrowly on getting the job done.

However, those same "if then" rewards turn out to be far less effective for complex, creative, conceptual endeavors - what psychologists call "heuristic" work. Think inventing a new product or working with a client to tackle a problem neither of you has confronted before. For those projects, you need a broader perspective, which, research shows, can be inhibited by "if then" rewards.

That leads us back to sales. In the middle of the last century, selling was fairly simple. Memorize your script, open your sample case a certain way, fire back standard responses to predictable objections - and do it over and over again until the law of averages works in your favor.

Today, though, the transactional aspects of sales are disappearing. When routine functions can be automated, and when customers and prospects often have as much data as the salesman himself, the skills that matter most are heuristic: Curating and interpreting information instead of merely dispensing it. Identifying new problems along with solving established ones. Selling insights rather than items.

Mitch Little began questioning the received wisdom on sales commissions in the late 1990s, shortly before he became vice president for worldwide sales and applications at Microchip Technology, a large semiconductor company headquartered near Phoenix. He oversaw 400 salespeople whose compensation plan was the industry standard - 60% base salary, 40% commissions.

"That made sense 40 years ago, when the Fuller Brush salesman went door-to-door," Little told me. "But the world of business-to-business sales has shifted fundamentally." So in an act of sacrilege for a onetime sales guy, Little killed commissions altogether. He established a new plan in which salespeople received 90% of their compensation in a high base salary, and the other 10 percent was linked to corporate (rather than individual) measures such as top-line growth, profits and earnings per share.

The result? Total sales increased. The cost of sales stayed the same. Attrition dropped. Retention rose. And today Microchip, a $6.5 billion public company, still maintains its commission-free 90/10 system - not just for its sales force but for almost everyone who isn't an hourly worker, including the CEO and Little himself. Its alternative compensation scheme is one reason Microchip has long been one of the top-performing companies in the semiconductor industry, ringing up 86 consecutive quarters of profits.

Neil Davidson, the co-founder and co-CEO of Red Gate Software, in Cambridge, England, followed a similar path. In 2009 he eliminated commissions for his sales force, replaced them with healthy base salaries and a generous benefits package, and proceeded to watch sales climb. Last year even a stalwart like GlaxoSmithKline joined the club, scrapping commissions for its fleet of U.S. pharmaceutical representatives.

Should every company forswear sales commissions? No. But simply challenging this orthodoxy helps us recognize that selling today is sophisticated, complex work - and that the people doing it therefore require incentives beyond a dangled carrot.

Daniel H. Pink is the author of four books about the changing world of work. His book, "To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others", was published in January 2013. Copyright 2012 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. This article first appeared on Leading Company.