The Obvious: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed. James Dale

the issues women face.

      In every case, management has been responsive, even pre-emptive to employee issues. These CEOs, COOs, and CFOs could have simply ignored the human needs of their workforces, rationalizing that each worker, whether on an assembly line or in a windowed office, was getting a paycheck and if any of them wanted different conditions or benefits or understanding, he or she could simply work elsewhere. Instead, these managers determined that they would get a much greater return by being reasonable, kind, decent, fair … that is, nice. And the attitude filters down through the ranks, through every level of management, perpetuating itself throughout the organizations. As it turns out, by and large, these companies are also highly successful, year after year, in up and down economies. Coincidence? Hardly.

      Do business the way these kinds of corporations and executives do and you’re in good company. Do business as a jerk and you’re not. Either way, you can probably make money. But when it comes time to hire or win new customers or just look at yourself in the mirror, whose company do you want to keep?

Part IV LISTEN MORE THAN YOU TALK

      Every day your job is to solve impossible problems: unhappy clients, over-worked employees, rising costs, falling quality, late shipments, broken products, broken promises, fierce competition, out-sourcing, down-sizing, shrinking margins, inflation, deflation, interest rates, overheads…

      But the fact is inside most business problems is a solution trying to get out. It’s just that we’re usually making too much of our own noise – selling, pitching, assuring, assuaging, talking, talking, talking – to hear the solution.

      Stop talking! Start listening! Your customer, client, vendor, shipper, contractor, supervisor, boss, competitor, whomever is trying to tell you the answers if only you’d pay attention. As they teach young medical students, “When you hear hoof beats, don’t look for zebras.”

      Listen twice as much as you talk and you’ll learn twice as much, and solve twice as many problems.

       Shut up

      It’s hard. When you hear a problem, you want to make it go away. With words – Let me explain. It’s really like this I promise. Got it. Done. No problem. But the problem is still there. It’s just buried under a barrage of language. Next time you face an issue, next time your reflex reaction is to say something … don’t. Not a sentence, not a word, not a grunt. Just imagine you have a mute button and push it. Close your mouth. The mere silence will communicate that you’re taking the issue seriously. What isn’t said can be as powerful as what is.

      McDonald’s is famous for their all-powerful ad campaigns – slogans, songs, promotions, in every medium, 24/7 – based on the belief if they sell hard enough and loud enough, we’ll all buy it. They should have lowered their volume enough to hear the stampede to the salad bar, granola bars, yogurts, fruits, and bottled waters. They’d have realized sooner that some people in the family, the car, or the office group don’t want deep-fried, high-fat, super-sized, mega-meals. And if you don’t have something else for those people, you run the risk of losing the rest of the people. So they had to play an expensive game of menu catch-up.

      A simple test: You’re invited to present your product line to a new customer. Before you even begin, he tells you his last vendor’s goods often arrived late, didn’t measure up to specs, and came in over budget. Then he tells you that all salespeople over-promise. Your lips part, your tongue is poised, your brain is composing rebuttals: Not us. Not my company. Not my products. Whoa. Close your mouth. Look him in the eye. Wait. What’s the message? You hear him. You’re not like other vendors. Not talking, not selling, not promising, and just absorbing the situation, the issue, or the problem is the first step to solving it.

       Listen. Then hear.

      Once it’s quiet, open your ears. Listen to the words, the volume, the inflection, nuance, whispers, emotion, pauses, even repetition. The people presenting the problems are trying to give you the answers. Let them.

      If he makes money, you make money: Your new shopping center tenant invested his life savings in a business with high potential sales per square foot. What kind of lease do you offer: high fixed rent or low base plus overages on sales? He’s practically screaming the answer. He invested his life savings so he can’t pay much during start-up. But if he makes money, he’s happy for you to make money. Low base plus overages.

      Conventional wisdom? Your investment client – single mother of two, manager of women’s boutique, facing private school tuition, a car payment, and full-time nanny – inherits $150,000 from her uncle. How do you recommend she invest it? Conventional wisdom says a diversified portfolio of growth stocks, mutual funds, and high-rated bonds. But if you’d have been listening, you’d know she needs income more than growth. Fewer stocks and mutual funds, more high-yield bonds, throwing off cash for expenses.

      The early boss. Your supervisor gets in early every morning, walks the office to see who’s there. Even if you’re a high-producing sales rep, he’s giving you a message: Get in early. His message may be silent, but it’s loud and clear … if you’re listening.

      When you go to work tomorrow, you can be sure you’ll be hit with a problem or two. Before you open your mouth, open your ears. The person with the problem is trying to give you the solution. Listen to the problem. Hear the answer.

       You can learn a lot from great listeners. And bad ones.

      Look at the marketplace and you can tell who’s been listening to the solutions within the problems and who hasn’t.

      Target heard Wal-Mart customers saying they liked the prices, not the style, or lack thereof. So Target signed up designers like Michael Graves (home appliances and kitchenware), Isaac Mizrahi (fashion and furniture), Mossimo (beach and casualwear), and Thomas O’Brien (vintage/modern combinations for home décor).

      Car rental companies heard travelers say, when the plane lands, they want to get in a car and go, not stand in line, fill out forms, show their license, swipe their credit card, accept or decline insurance, fill up or return empty, etc, etc. So they created Number One Clubs, Preferreds, and Emerald Aisles to preregister data, so members can get off the plane, get in a car and … go! They even pay extra to belong, which shows that listening pays.

      Cable companies still don’t hear. Customers can’t wait at home between 8 and 12 or 1 and 5 for an installer who may or may not show up.

      Online universities heard the problem and the solution. Lots of students can’t go to an ivy-covered institution paid for by mom and dad. Some have to work, raise families, or take care of a parent. They get online degrees without leaving home or the office.

      Banks used to only see customers during “bankers’ hours.” Then they found they could handle more customers with ATMs and online banking, 24/7, for less than keeping the branches staffed even a few hours a day. Cable companies, take note.

      Most newspapers still haven’t heard. They sit unread on front porches and in vending boxes, barely changing format or content, creating virtually no synergy between their paper and online versions, while the world turns to CNN, Bloomberg, C-Span, The Daily Show, satellite radio, MSN, dotcoms, and blogs.

      Consumers honked through heavy traffic until we got HOV lanes and EZ Passes, complained about unsanitary bathrooms until we got automatic flushes, demanded and got free wireless internet thanks to Starbucks and others. Now we want parking meters that don’t need exact change, humans instead of phone prompts, and cars that don’t dent … in case someone is listening.

      Listen. You will look