“I agree with you 1,000%!”

• Too many sports announcers, what might be a majority of daily conversationalists and corollary to the coach who says, “Give it 110%!”

Math is math, and 100% equals the maximum.

It’s hyperbole; I get it. The only problem with hyperbole is that it’s morphed from tongue-in-cheek, intentional and probably humorously-intended exaggeration-for-effect to a general means of speaking. It’s like “We strenuously object” from the movie A Few Good Men. Unnecessary, non-additive, and diluting to whatever point we’re trying to make.

In Matthew 5:37, we’re taught, “let your yes be yes and your no be no.” Or, as the NIV version puts it, “all you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

It ties to the post on “worry” from last week. It ties to why we feel over-committed and empty at times. It robs us of the clarity to focus, function and feel. “Gee, he agrees 1000% percent and I only agree completely. I feel like I’m letting the team down…” The language is simpler than we make it, and so, it follows, is life.

A public speaking mentor once told a group of us, “Just freaking SAY IT!” Not just in emphasizing the right syllable but also in putting the words in the right order and being real.

“He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.”

• Seneca The Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher

Thinking things through as part of a planning process is part o’ the deal. Makes perfect sense. It allows us to build off-ramps and on-ramps to shift as the market or conditions dictate.

Worrying is two things. First, it’s an affront to God. Second, it’s early and unnecessary suffering.

There’s a difference between, “If this happens, we have some options…” and “Oh, no, Chicken Little, the sky really IS falling!”

Anticipate and plan, but don’t worry. Unnecessary suffering sounds icky.

“Show me wax on, wax off.”

• Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita (1932 – 2005) in the original Karate Kid move (circa 1984)

Teaching is an excellent place for a Difference Maker to show up. Mr. Miyagi was a great teacher. Ralph Macchio’s Daniel hated the pace (and method) of teaching his mentor used. (Ralph is a couple months younger than me, and sometimes I lost my patience with Dick Heston, so maybe it’s a late Boomer era thing…)

He just wanted to learn to fight.

“Show me sand the floor. Show me wax on, wax off. Show me paint the fence…” (some language in there, spoiler alert).

Nowadays, we’re probably more called upon to lead with the “Why?” but in 1984 with an impetuous teenager, Miyagi led with the what without any context. The context came later, in the scene linked above. Just as it did in the 70’s with Dick Heston and his own impetuous teenager. “Why not put another layer of bales on the wagon, Dad? We’d get done 20% faster.” A few years later I learned (the hard way) that Heston Farms hay wagons weren’t meant to hold 72 bales. I just wanted to get it wrapped up…

A prospective Client a couple of weeks ago asked me: “OK, how do we do this and get it wrapped up in, say, the next year or so?”

I’m pretty sure I already know the what, but what he didn’t have yet was the context. And, in business, the vertical and ancillary markets, intended outcome, timing, exit plan, etc. all play into what “the what” may be.

“Until we dig in and do an assessment, we can’t prescribe a specific set of actions,” I replied. “There are three or four things we know we’re going to need to do, but doing them in the right order, in conjunction with whatever else we find out during the assessment will pay off in multiples.”

It’s possible we could have booked a 12 – 18 month engagement at the table that day. Instead, we’re asking for a shot to spend a few weeks assessing and laying out a plan upon which he, me, or we can execute. I’m suggesting we sand the floor, paint the fence, and put the wax on and off.

There’s a chance we won’t win the bigger gig. When we do, there’s an even greater chance that everyone will get more out of it and sleep better because we will have done it the right way. Doing the job the right way still matters, even in the instant gratification, AI-infested world in which we operate.

Doing it the right way. Difference-making stuff.

“Ideas are the currency of Difference Makers, and storytelling is the channel by which the payment is delivered.”

• Steve Heston, author o’ this here blog

As usual Seth Godin said it better than me, so here’s his take.

I almost always agree with Seth, yet I’m unsure whether he or I first arrived at this concept. Either way, a “just the facts” approach virtually never conveys the story. And the story worth telling is worth telling well.

Subscribers will receive this post on Tuesday, November 19th, at which time I’ll be under general anesthesia for the third time in 54 weeks. The Million Mile tune-up has been a b****, I tell ya!

With all these new parts, I expect next year’s golf season to be amazing. Actually, I probably don’t, but it will be nice to have a shot to play comparatively pain-free.

“The key to test for an acronym is whether it helps or hurts communication.”

• Elon Musk (b. 1971) one o’ the world’s financially wealthiest men and undoubtedly a “free thinker…”

Acronyms. If you’re in the business of selling, which means you’re telling stories, acronyms are usually a crutch (at best) or a confusing fit of showmanship and elitism at worst. Even “industry standard” acronyms can seem shallow. “How do you keep inside the lines when it comes to HIPPA?” we might ask a health care Client, when “Tell me what you’re doing about compliance and information security” will get us a better insight into the way they run their business.

Baseball has so many new acronyms that I can’t follow it (and I played after high school and coached for 15 years after that). And then I remember that it comes down to this (thanks Moneyball). Not HR’s, RBI’s, ERA’s. Does the guy get on base? (There is an acronym for that, but cut me some slack here, people!)

Take, for example, EBITDA. It stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.” It’s a metric used to assess the value of many companies in merger and acquisition talks by buyers, sellers, and lenders. There are, however, two reasons I’ll never use it again. (“Never” is not a word I take lightly, just like “always,” “every time” and “everyone…”)

1. A few years back, I was advising a Client about to sell their business. He had an offer of $x. “What’s that based upon?” I asked him. “It’s just what it’s worth,” he said. (He did need an advisor…) “By what is it based on?” I continued. “I mean, is it an asset sale, a multiple-based sale – how did you or the buyer arrive at that number?” He replied, “Multiple of what?” “Is it a multiple tied to your revenue, projected cash flows, net profit or (here it comes) EBITDA?” “You know what I hate about guys like you” he barked? “You think it’s all just numbers. My dad owned this business, and when he died, he said, “don’t take less than $x if you sell it. I need to move on, and $x seems fair? Why does it have to be so complicated?” ^{(Editor’s note: one could argue he needed an advisor long before this point, but bear with me…)}
2. The second reason I’ll never use it again; Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s long-time lieutenant, often said, “If you don’t understand “EBITDA” just substitute the word bullshit, because they mean the same thing.”

Early this week, we’re rolling out a go-to-market strategy for a Client. It’s pretty solid. At least we think it is.

Ironically, we will use acronyms. Internally. To remind us of the order and intent of our new thinking. One of them won’t be, but could be (for the sake of example) KISS. (Keep it simple silly!)

We will NOT use acronyms in the market. We’ll use questions, because curiosity is the most powerful tool in the world. We’ll use words, primarily the words the market tells us it want us to use. We’ll use stories, that include ideas and words that move people.

The internal acronyms will help us measure how we stick to the plan. The feedback will tell us if we chose the right acronyms. And then, when we drop or change them, the market will never know.

“(When it comes to mission statements)… you’re fighting for people’s attention. When people begin reading a mission statement, they have low expectations. They’re expecting a piece of corporate cliché apparently provided purely because the company knows it ought to have one.”

• Bernard Marr, LinkedIn poster and strategic advisor

Recently, at a Client’s site, we were working on messaging. We were NOT working on a mission statement or a vision statement. We were working on a go-to-market message for a new initiative, one that should be difference-making for the Client. It will, when successful, be difference-making for the constituents touched by the initiative, and (oh, yeah!) it has the potential to be difference-making for an audience about eleventy-three times bigger (remember, “bigger” and “more better” are technical terms here at The Diff!).

Not ironically, this long-standing, well-intentioned, and very successful Client’s leadership team couldn’t recite its mission or vision statements, and the exceptionally bright team of professionals around the table started out sort of hating the exercise, at least a little.

Until they didn’t.

Until it landed.

Eight words. Compelling, direct, non-confrontational, non-controversial. Instead, it’s differentiating, meaningful and formed in a way that even opposing organizations would have to say, “Dang it, how do you argue with THAT?” And, in getting there, a few of the team used the magic phrase, “Isn’t that how we make a difference?”

In other words, they chose a means of saying what they actually do, instead of trying to create a grandiose statement that they feel like they ought to have.

Ultimately, everything is about execution, of course. It’s a good thing that execution is more straightforward when there’s an eight-word description of what we’re trying to execute and when everyone engaged agrees with it.

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

• George Eliot (1819 – 1880), English novelist, poet, Victorian era

Yet life, the Enemy, society, and social media don’t want us to remember that.

The rear-view mirror tells us where we’ve been, and the windshield shows us where we’re going, as the overworked cliche reminds us. Size matters in this case, it turns out.

What lies ahead is pretty much without borders, restrictions, and limits. More importantly, what lies behind is finished. That thing we did or said can’t be undone or unsaid.

I joked with a couple of my military buddies on Veteran’s Day about whether I could pass the basic training physical and join up as a tribute to them. “What’s your two-mile run time?” one of them asked, prompting my reply: “A week, week-and-a-half, maybe!” So, are there some borders, restrictions, and limitations? Of course! Yet, for every twenty we imagine, one may be real. For every reason “to not to,” (Thanks, ‘Mater, from Cars!), there are twenty reasons to.

“Never” is not a word I like to use, nor is it one I take lightly. I’ll stand with George Eliot on this one. It is never too late to make a difference.

“Philosophy teaches us how to act, not how to talk.”

• Seneca , (d. 65 AD), Stoic Roman philosopher

Did you have that picture of the philosopher sitting idly by, still and silent, simply thinking?

“Our philosophy here at Pat’s Magical Widgets is that every customer leaves happy.” Until the customer tries to negotiate a really good price. Or until the customer posts on social media about a damaged delivery or a rude employee. Or until the customer is 118 days late on their bill.

Our philosophy must not be a picture. It’s gotta be our own Marvel Movie, with a cool-as-hell soundtrack and a killer cast. (A random aside: Who would you cast to play you in the movie? I’m thinking Hugh Jackman (or Huge Ackman in Night At The Museum.)

While I am still a “growth guy,” I was a “turn-around guy” for years, and I hate the parts where people’s careers are redirected harshly, but I miss the buzz of instant gratification when the people and the business grow quickly.

That’s helped me realize that I have a turn-around mentality. A philosophy to turn things around until they’re “right.”

A few times in my career, I’ve been criticized for taking a turnaround approach to a more established business. I’ve been told that “change can’t happen that quickly here.”

Philosophically speaking, your organization can handle whatever you’ve prepared it to handle. If you’ve prepared them to finish, your team won’t throw up on itself in the 4th quarter. (Sports analogy – oops). The attack from the flank won’t rattle your platoon if you’ve prepared them to know where the enemy is at all times. (Military analogy – I’m on a roll, right? Just toss in a dating analogy and…. Um let’s move on…).

Philosophy = action. What do our actions all day, every day, tell the world about our philosophy? How will they know what we believe in if we don’t show it, live it, and breathe it?

“Just once, I want the opportunity to sweep everything off the table to make room for a giant map that I’ll use to explain the plan.”

• Asher Perlman, Monday Morning Memo, September 26, 2022

One of the best scenes from Apollo XIII is when Ed Harris’ character brought in the box of items and said something along the lines of “We have to get them back from the moon with what’s in this box…”

We’ve all seen the movies where the table gets wiped clean and the map gets laid out and everyone says, “Gee, why didn’t we think of that?”

The gesture is grandiose, and it might be overly so.

The process, however, is worth considering.

“All this “stuff” we’ve been focused on is still here, even when we’re not focusing on it,” we might say. “Someone take a picture of that white board before I erase it and let’s start over from scratch.”

On the blank white board, we can start with ideas like “it’s (some date in the future) and we failed because…..” Or, “this solution we use in the mix for our primary revenue driver is found to be toxic, it’s price triples and we face regulatory pressure to change our mix…how would we do it?”

The idea of starting from the proverbial blank slate isn’t bad at all. We ought to go into it without tossing all our crap on the floor, and without the expectation that within a few minutes, we’ll have the answer dropped in our laps.

Try new things. Test them. Try a couple things off the learnings. Test them. One. Foot. Ahead. Of. The. Other. Less grandiose. More better.

In the hit TV Series, The West Wing (1999 – 2006), President Jed Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, wasted no time moving on when it was time to move on.

“When I ask “What’s next?” it means I’m ready to move on to other things,” he says in the video clip attached here. “So, what’s next?“

What’s next for us, as Difference Makers?

In business, many have been heard in recent weeks to say “after the election.” In the Faith-based discipline of fasting, we learn the freedom of getting away from “after lunch” or “before dinner.” Our to-do lists are rarely written in order of priority, which sometimes means we move on the wrong “what’s next,” or at least a less valuable “what’s next” than if we took the question at face value.

“What’s next?”

In this moment, what is the one thing we should do, presuming it was the last thing we were ever going to do? It might be to write a note. It might be to make a decision. It might be to ask a question, read some research, call a Client, or make right an old wrong. It might be, as Dick Heston used to say, to “don’t just do something, stand there.” In other words, it might be to think. Reflect. Evaluate. Discern. Listen. Pray. Meditate. Just be.

When our “What’s next?” is dialed in, our “What just happened?” tends to have made a difference.