Body of Work Page 14

  The company spent $500 million per year on hourly labor and used a system that was designed to schedule labor for commission sales force. The hourly labor is not “self-funded” like commission, so labor has to be closely matched to customer demand and other work that takes place in the store.

  2. What did you do about it (your action steps)?

  Installed a new labor-scheduling system—a significant initiative that included the purchase of a new system from Kronos that provided labor scheduling, time and attendance, and daily/weekly/monthly dynamic budgeting.

  3. What were the results? (quantify with monetary value, percentage, or numbers)

  The labor scheduling initiatives yielded $5 million of annual benefit.

  4. What was the strategic impact on the company?

  The new labor system allowed the company to be more competitive in the marketplace with a more effective way to manage the cost of its greatest expense (labor) while simultaneously improving the ability to serve customers. The new system also provided growth capabilities:

  • Allowing new standard prototype stores to open profitability

  • Creating the ability to have a labor model customized for new prototypes

  5. What skills and strengths did you identify in your story?

  Project and team leadership. Technology know-how. Being a champion for continuous improvement and finding ways to save money for the company. Initiative in identifying and solving problems. Resource and vendor management.

  The two critical stories for career success

  I spoke with a client who was entering the job market after spending an extended period of time doing a mix of freelance work and raising children.

  He was concerned about holes in his experience and the impact they would have on securing a good job.

  He felt scared, uncomfortable, and insecure.

  Another client had gone through a really tough period in her life, which had caused her to drop some balls at work. Coworkers weren’t happy, and she was concerned about how it would impact her opportunities moving forward.

  She felt awkward, ashamed, and stuck.

  In both these cases, there are two very important stories to tell.

  The story you tell yourself

  Going after new goals is challenging. The job market is competitive. It isn’t easy to create art, or to get customers, or to write a book. It is hard to bounce back from failure or adversity. Before you start to worry about what someone else thinks about you, you have to make sure that you are thinking great things about yourself.

  Consider the difference between these two stories.

  “I have been out of the job market for five years and have not kept up on all the latest trends in technology. I am scared that prospective employers might see me as lacking. I must do whatever it takes to prove that I am worthy. I am desperate for a job. I will take any opportunity that comes my way and heave a sigh of relief, because it will mean that they accept me, despite my flaws.”

  How are you feeling after reading something like this? Kind of yucky and in need of a hug, right?

  Consider this alternative.

  “I am proud of the wide variety of experiences that I have had in my life. I can think of many times when I was put into new and challenging situations and learned quickly. Being out of the job market for a while has given me a new and refreshing perspective that makes me extremely focused and excited for new opportunities. I have enjoyed working for myself, but now I am ready to be back in a team environment where I have support and resources to get my work done. I want to work in a place that appreciates my experience. I will do a great job, and they will be lucky to have me.”

  That feels better, doesn’t it? The first story reminds me of Das Boot (a film some find a classic, but what I find a most depressing German film about men stuck in a submarine) and the second story reminds me of Rocky III. (No one brings out “Eye of the Tiger” like Apollo Creed.)

  When crafting your personal story, consider:

  What skills and strengths and ingredients am I really proud of?

  What are the threads and themes of my life experience?

  What big gifts have I received from challenges I have faced?

  What is my hero’s journey?

  What is the soundtrack of my life? Is it one of the most depressing country songs of all time or an uplifting anthem?

  The story you tell others

  Once you get a clear and empowering story to tell yourself, you need to work on the story that will resonate and influence others. In addition to the questions you have answered for your own story, add these:

  What challenges are these (potential employers, prospective clients, resistant team members, crowdfunding prospects) facing?

  How might my background and experience help them to overcome their challenges?

  How can I clearly and powerfully respond to legitimate concerns about holes, gaps, or weaknesses in my background or skills?

  How does my total life experience give me a unique competitive advantage over fellow job applicants or business owners?

  How can I prepare to give the best interview or sales call of my life?

  How can I deliver tremendous, measurable value to the people I want to work with?

  Every day, I see people with similar backgrounds and equivalent skills accomplish radically different results.

  One big reason for this is the story they tell themselves and others on a daily basis.

  The quality of your life is directly related to the quality of your stories.

  You must craft them well.

  The Persuasive Story Pattern

  Nancy Duarte has spent her life studying the craft of storytelling.

  As the cofounder of the world-renowned Silicon Valley presentation design firm Duarte, she has worked with some of the most influential businesspeople and thinkers in the world.

  A few years ago, she was doing research for her book Resonate.

  She studied dramatic plot structure in theater from Gustav Freytag and Aristotle’s three-part story structure.

  But when she studied Joseph Campbell, she got really excited.

  “I got most enraptured by Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. It is such a beautiful pattern for transformation. You can overlay it on life, corporate change initiatives, over so many things. You can look at where you are in your life and actually plot out how your life is going to turn out.”

  By analyzing hundreds of the most famous speeches of all time and testing different story structures, she discovered a story pattern that mirrored the greatest speeches in the world. Her breakthrough came one morning when she overlaid both Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Steve Jobs’s 2007 iPhone launch speech, and they both matched her Persuasive Story Pattern.

  Nancy describes how to craft your story, using the Persuasive Story Pattern.

  Craft the beginning

  Start by describing life as the audience knows it. People should be nodding their heads in recognition because you’re articulating what they already understand. This creates a bond between you and them, and opens them up to hear your ideas for change.

  After you set that baseline of what is, introduce your vision of what could be. The gap between the two will throw the audience a bit off-balance, and that’s a good thing—it jars them out of complacency. For instance:

  What is: We fell short of our Q3 financial goals partly because we’re understaffed and everyone’s spread too thin.

  What could be: But what if we could solve the worst of our problems by bringing in a couple of powerhouse clients? Well, we can.

  Once you establish that gap, use the rest of the presentation to bridge it.

  Develop the middle

  Now that people in your audience realize their world is off-kilter, k
eep playing up the contrast between what is and what could be.

  Let’s go back to that Q3 update. Revenues are down, but you want to motivate employees to make up for it. Here’s one way you could structure the middle of your presentation:

  What is: We missed our Q3 forecast by 15 percent.

  What could be: Q4 numbers must be strong for us to pay out bonuses.

  What is: We have six new clients on our roster.

  What could be: Two of them have the potential to bring in more revenue than our best clients do now.

  What is: The new clients will require extensive retooling in manufacturing.

  What could be: We’ll be bringing in experts from Germany to help.

  As you move back and forth between what is and what could be, the audience will find the latter more and more alluring.

  Make the ending powerful

  You don’t want to end with a burdensome list of to-dos. Definitely include a call to action—but make it inspiring so people will want to act. Describe what I call the new bliss: how much better their world will be when they adopt your ideas.

  So if you’re wrapping up that Q3 update from above, you might approach it this way:

  Call to action: It will take extra work from all departments to make Q4 numbers, but we can deliver products to our important new clients on time and with no errors.

  New bliss: I know everyone’s running on fumes—but hang in there. This is our chance to pull together like a championship team, and things will get easier if we make this work. The reward if we meet our Q4 targets? Bonuses, plus days off at the end of the year.

  By defining future rewards, you show people that getting on board will be worth their effort. It’ll meet their needs, not just yours.

  Nancy believes that understanding story structure will not only make you a much better communicator, it will also allow you to change the world. I believe that by mastering the art of storytelling, you will be able to organize your body of work into a compelling story and present it to the world.

  Your life as told by Google

  Like it or not, Google is telling a story about you right now.

  Go ahead, Google your name.

  Hopefully you have narrated part of your story and are happy about what people have written or shared about you. If you aren’t, the good news is that you can change it.

  Words, images, and videos make up a multicolored tapestry of your life on the Web.

  Jobs are won and business is sold by the strength of the story told by Google when people look you up on the Web. As you create your body of work, you need to package it, to illustrate it, and to tie it together in a cohesive story.

  What have you done? What do people say about you? Who are you connected to? Who is connected to you and your message? What do you stand for? How does your work in Sector A tie to the project you are doing in Sector B that you are trying to sell to the Sector C?

  Your body of work content map

  In order to tell a cohesive story about your body of work, you need to create a content map.

  When I was developing my Escape from Cubicle Nation blog and business, I took out a pad of paper and put a big box in the middle labeled “My People.”

  Then I asked myself: What do they really need?

  For this business, my people were corporate employees who wanted to quit their job and start a business. I brainstormed a bunch of different needs, then grouped them in four major categories:

  Pillar 1—Knowledge: How do you work through each stage of creating a business? What are the most efficient/effective ways to get things done? Whom can I trust?

  Pillar 2—Encouragement: Giving up a job is mighty scary. Many people are racked with self-doubt. So ongoing doses of “you are not crazy,” “you go girl/guy,” and “you are almost at the finish line” are very important.

  Pillar 3—Community: It is very isolating to make a big change by yourself. The more positive, supportive people surround you, the quicker you will make progress and launch your business.

  Pillar 4—Promotion. Once your business is up and running, you need exposure so your business is successful and you make enough money to quit your day job.

  Once clear on what your audience needs, you can build a product/service map that follows them along a clear and defined path.

  In my own coaching work, I know that people generally follow the path outlined in my book:

  They want assurance they are not crazy for leaving a good corporate job.

  They have to figure out which business to start.

  They have to figure out if there is viability in that market.

  They have to produce and test a product or service.

  They have to tell their loved ones they want to make a major career shift.

  They have to build relationships with their market, and a larger tribe of supporters, peers, and mentors.

  They have to figure out their personal financial plan.

  They have to create an implementation plan and then make it happen.

  They have to give notice at their job and leave relationships intact if things don’t turn out as planned.

  They have to implement their sales and marketing plan, track their results, and make adjustments.

  Develop and share the content they need

  Through a period of eight years, I shared hundreds of blog posts, videos, audios, e-books, events, webinars, classes, speeches, workshops, and a book to address the particular needs of my market.

  I used social media tools like my blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ to:

  Share knowledge (pillar 1), provide encouragement (pillar 2), and promote (pillar 4) the work of my clients and blog community.

  Create places online and in person where people in a similar situation could build community (pillar 3).

  By consistently sharing the information that I had gathered by growing my body of work, through being self-employed, blogging, tweeting, planning, and getting through the hard times, I became well-known for this particular aspect of my body of work.

  A content map for your career

  If you work as an employee in a corporation or a nonprofit, your content map would still be quite similar to the one described above. Remember, organizations can build a body of work too.

  Imagine all the information, resources, support, and encouragement your customers, donors, vendors, coworkers and management needs to accomplish their goals.

  Share this information in meetings, presentations, e-mails, and where possible, external blogs and presentations. More and more employees of large companies are writing external blogs and building up their reputation and personal brand online.

  How to create a personal content map

  1. Define the specific needs of people you want to influence with your body of work. Take a piece of paper, put them in the middle, and ask yourself, “What are the major things they need to fully solve their problem?”

  Sketch out the steps they need to address their problem. Think of a typical person who comes to you for help. What is the first problem they need help solving? Once that problem is solved, where do they tend to go next? Create a path of steps that ends with them realizing their goals.

  2. Create content that helps them solve their problem. You have wonderful tools like blogs, podcasts, tweets, e-books and videos to create useful, valuable content that helps your people solve their problems. Couple this with more intensive support (paid teleclasses, workshops, tutorials, coaching, retreats) and they will have everything they need to solve their problem. Remember that much of your audience will solve their problem using your free material. But there will always be people who are willing to pay for more specific and individual support.

  3. Sprinkle the products and services that your people really need. Think of ways to strengthen your pai
d offerings by adding in the specific things that will help your people succeed. As an example, the way I meet the needs of my people is to offer knowledge with blog posts, programs, workshops, and retreats. I give them inspiration with speeches, interviews with experts and cool people just like them who have made the leap successfully, daily tweets, Facebook updates, e-mails, and free calls. I give them community with live events where they can gather with like-minded people. I give them promotion by tweeting and blogging about their businesses, mentioning them in my press interviews, and making introductions with mentors and customers.

  4. Organize your content map in a clear and compelling manner and promote the heck out of it. Depending on the communication style of your market, you can develop a whole range of promotional materials, including a Web-based product map, or a nicely designed set of printed materials. It is wonderful if you can get the domain name for your own name and use yourname.com as a central place to host all of your content.

  With a clear content map and plan, you are ready to focus on the quality of your content.

  How to communicate clearly

  “Let the wild rumpus start.”

  The first time I read this passage to my three-year old from the classic Maurice Sendak book Where the Wild Things Are, I felt a wave of pleasure and a flashback to my own childhood. I had forgotten how ripe and tantalizing the words were; perfectly chosen, crisp, simple, and powerful.

  Why isn’t all writing like that?

  As readers, we hunger for clear, useful, insightful, and inspiring words.

  As writers, we long to speak the truth and say something relevant and important.

  But somehow in our professional lives, we are taught to convolute, complicate, and butcher perfectly good language when communicating with users, clients, customers, employees, and partners.

  How can we clean up our stories so that we evoke the spirit of a well-written book? Here are some places to demonstrate clear and effective language.

  In presentations: Trust your instincts