Five Ways To Quickly Increase Your Technical Prowess

In my work with leaders of all disciplines, this is the area I hear the greatest resistance to because of the hidden concern about intricate details. Technology has become more complex, and the grandiose promises of artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced robotics can overwhelm even the most technically curious.

Here’s how to overcome that fast:

1. Ask for a metaphor when a technology genius is giving an explanation. ‘It is like someone changed the locks to our house and only they have the master key’ is how a chief information security officer explained a highly complex situation for me. Before then he spent far too long giving me the intricacies of the security breach, which simply went over my head.
   

2. A picture explains a thousand technologies. Sometimes you just need a drawing, so ask for a visual representation of how all of your systems talk to each other, or how they are disconnected. Stand together in front of a whiteboard with a technology peer and draw it out together and it will help you see the dependencies and opportunities for how your work may become symbiotic. You’d be surprised how many companies have a technology map that looks like someone threw a whole plate of spaghetti at a wall! Far more complex than it needs to be!
   

3. Find a technical mentor. You don’t want to be in a board meeting or an important customer meeting asking how one system works or what a particular company buzz word means. Identify a technical expert who can be your mentor on technology areas and whom you can feel free to ask any questions. Ask them for a glossary of terms with simple definitions.
   

4. Sit in on a technical product design review or product development meeting so you can hear the language they use, or the areas they are debating. You might figure out a way your teams could work together to solve a mutual challenge.
   

5. Shadow your technical peers. Put your endless empathy into practice. There is no better way to appreciate another colleague’s life than to literally walk in their shoes for a day. Ask them for a day that would give you the most insight and increase your understanding of their world. Attend a CIO or CTO conference. Ask them where they get their industry technical news from and ask them to send you articles that might be interesting. Join a ClubHouse room that covers technical experts from your industry.
   

Too often business leaders don’t dive deep here or fail to surround themselves with people who can translate the technical realities and opportunities in clear ways.

This is the third and final part of this mini-series of VAL-Uable Insights which has now covered all three parts of the Trilingual Executive:
How you can unlock your creative understanding, How to increase your business understanding. It is important to realize you won’t always get it right, and sometimes translation fails. You can read more in Chapter Three of Rapid Growth, Done Right.

Meanwhile I’d love to hear what has worked for you or answer your questions.

Here’s to your increased Trilingual Understanding!

Val

P.S. I hope you enjoyed this week's VAL-uable Insights, sign up here to get them in your inbox each Monday morning: http://valwrightconsulting.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Five Ways To Quickly Increase Your Business Understanding

Can you immediately translate your work to show measurable impact? With specifics, dollar amounts, efficiency gains, market share, customer metrics, meaningful data that matters, and can you share it in a concise manner?

If not try these five ideas:

1. Immerse yourself in the business metrics that your company or division reports on. Create a glossary for your team of metrics that matter to your CEO and leadership team.
   

2. Read your annual report, earnings report, S1 filing or quarterly financial updates. Ask your finance leader to check your understanding or to answer questions you have.
   

3. For every single business and personal goal, extrapolate a financial impact. Connect your work to revenue, profit, market share and customer metrics that have a dollar sign. This exercise alone will help you attract the right attention when you are seeking to influence investment or prioritize decisions.
   

4. Watch CNBC’s Squawk Box each morning and take note of the global, industry and competitive news stories. Also pay attention to the executives interviewed and observe how they frame their soundbites and answers so that listeners can rapidly absorb their message.
   

5. Go back to the floor and shadow every key function, including customer support, supply chain, sales, finance, operations, marketing and so forth, and identify where there are profit, revenue and efficiency gains.

If you follow each of these five ideas, you will set the context for your work and be able to answer what I call the ‘so what?’ question, which is: “So what is the point of your work in business outcomes?” Master this and you will transform how your message is understood and acted upon.

If you read this and thought this is just too obvious, then I can relate. But...Please share it with those you work with as it is not as commonly understood as you might assume.

Last week we looked at how you can unlock your creative understanding and improve relationships with your creatively minded colleagues...Next week we explore how you increase your technical prowess. That will cover the trilingual elements that you need to master if you really want to make rapid growth happen in the right way. Or, if you are as impatient as I am - you can find out more in Chapter Three of Rapid Growth, Done Right.

Finally...did you see how Reddit won the Super Bowl? Simply. Brilliant. Marketing. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Look here.

To your continuous rapid growth,

Val

P.S. I hope you enjoyed this week's VAL-uable Insights, sign up here to get them in your inbox each Monday morning: http://valwrightconsulting.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Five Ways To Embrace Your Creative Understanding

Creative, Technical, and Business leaders often don't understand each other. Intentions get lost in translation. Confusion occurs because of a lack of a shared understanding. I often overhear conversations between Marketing, Technology, Product, Sales, Finance, and Business leaders and it is like they have landed in Japan and they are trying to talk French!

I tell many stories of the brilliant ways creative, technical, and business leaders can form a symbiotic relationship in my virtual interactive experiences. If you haven't yet heard me talk about this, for the next three VAL-uable Insights, I will be sharing Five Fast Tips for increasing your understanding of your creative, technical, and business peers...

First up, Embracing Your Creative Understanding:

1. Experiment with new ways of working to wake up your creative brain. Ewan Pidgeon, director of Creative Services at Ingram Micro, will regularly tell his peers to write with a different pen, sit at a different desk, take a different route to work or embrace other different habits to wake up their inner creativity. Doing so will help you experience what your creative peers do each day.
   

2. Immerse yourself in the brand, design and user interface of your products and those of your competitors. Form opinions about what you experience and discuss it with your creative peers. Ever wondered why your logo is designed the way it is, or why the website landing page navigates the way it does? Everything is done for a reason and the more curious you can be, the more it will help you start to see how a creative mind works. This will accelerate your ability to speak to and gain the support of your creatively minded colleagues.
   

3. Shadow a creative colleague. Chris Capossela, chief marketing officer of Microsoft, regularly shares on his social-media channels pictures of himself being shadowed by engineering leaders. This helps set context, and lets you see the depth of thinking that goes into a creative brief. In the future, when you want to change or challenge an idea, you can practice your empathy for the work that came before it and the work that you will be triggering afterwards.
   

4. Attend a marketing event where industry experts are showcasing their work and ask your marketing colleagues what could be relevant for you. Perhaps you can take inspiration from the Farmers Insurance duo where the CIO and CMO presented together on stage at a Gartner's Evanta event I was also speaking at.
   

5. Follow creative gurus. One of my favorites is Bonin Bough, one of the youngest C-suite executives who was behind the first-ever 3D printed food product, a customized Oreo. Bough now shares his brilliance through TV shows and his social-media channels. He is perfect for bursting your usual bubble of voices to listen to. Once you have awakened new creative juices and understanding, you can then focus on how to embrace your inner technical genius...tune in for next week's VAL-uable Insights to hear Five Ways to Increase Your Technical Prowess, or if you are as impatient as I am - you can find out more in Chapter Three of Rapid Growth, Done Right.

How do you immerse yourself in the creativity of your company and industry? I'd love to hear...

To your continuous rapid growth,

Val

P.S. I hope you enjoyed this week's VAL-uable Insights, sign up here to get them in your inbox each Monday morning: http://valwrightconsulting.com/newsletter-sign-up/