Greg's Right FIT #543–This week: Sleeping, Turnovering, Gooseberrying

Quick notes to help you find new business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.

In this issue: 

• Thoughts on Sleep
• Being Human
• Random Stuff
• Back In The Day

Thoughts on Sleep

• The best way to deal with a pressure-filled period of time is being well rested. We need to get our sleep. The research says to use all the tricks in the book to get it because there is no one-quick-fix. Sleep tight!
• Since we know that sleep impacts individual performance, we should be aware of our team's restfulness. It's impossible to control our team's sleep, but we can remind them of its importance by circulating sleep study articles each week for a month or two.
• Sales team tend to be less alert in the afternoon. The late corporate raider T. Boone Pickens was rumored to use this to his advantage. They said he would schedule important meetings for the late afternoon after his nap. He would be alert while the other party felt the afternoon drag. Tell your team about it. Making big decisions early in the day when we're alert is a decent rule to follow.
• Along those same lines, my favorite time of day to write is very early. My favorite time for hard phone calls is 9am. My favorite nap time is 3:30pm. Watch your people's energy levels and schedule accordingly.

Being Human – Turnover

“In a lecture . . . A young woman raised her hand: 'But how could you afford to pay so much more than your competition?' The answer, of course, is that good people pay by their extra productivity. You can’t afford to have cheap employees.” ― Joe Coulombe

"Thoughts on Retaining Sales Talent" is something I wrote about 14 years ago. I used to do a lot more sales management consulting work at the time and I'm thinking of getting back into it. It's an evergreen problem.

There's a slew of new tools in the market that help with things an effective sales manager needs. For instance, my son sells a tool from Balto.ai that helps with coaching in a call center environment. And today at lunch I learned about Letter.ai, which helps companies get their sales reps up to speed faster. Reading their websites, it seems like we're still addressing the same problems I worked on decades ago: finding the right people, getting them productive, and keeping them.

When it comes to keeping them, I wrote, ". . . turnover shouldn't be celebrated as anything less than a failure of the organization to help your sales talent navigate the inevitable ups and downs that any results based position entails." Besides the grammar and a questionable word choice (celebrated?) my opinion hasn't changed. I think you want your organization to consider turnover in sales as a systemic failure. The reason is simple. If you don't think that way, nothing gets done to fix it.

I read the book by Joe Coulombe founder of Trader Joe's, "Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys." In it, he makes a case for why he made sure his people were paid well above average for grocers. It boiled down to institutional knowledge. His senior people were more effective, especially his senior buyers, because they knew way more than his suppliers. That may or may not be true, but once he decided to keep turnover to a minimum, his team came up with ways to make it happen. The best people stuck around. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I look forward to learning about how the new tools work. Especially when compared to my old fashioned management training based solutions. Humans are complicated creatures, even when enhanced with technology.

Random Stuff

"Ivan Ivanich and Bourkin were received by a chambermaid; such a pretty young woman that both of them stopped and exchanged glances."
– Chekhov's Gooseberries

In my late twenties I worked with a guy that was part of a fast growing company right out of school. We were the exact same age, literally born months apart. He was in the right place at the right time and made an unusual amount of money for a twenty-twoish year old. Then he stopped working. Legend had it he didn't work from twenty four to twenty nine when we met. When we asked what he did in that period he said, not much. He did what he wanted and now he was ready to work again.

Around that same time, I saw an interview with actress Linda Fiorentino of "Men In Black" fame. She was talking to Charlie Rose and she said something similar. She did movies to make some money, then did her own thing until she was running low on funds, then she went back and made another movie.

It stuck with me because it seemed so punk rock to imagine someone's primary mode not being "work." Not being go, go, go, get more, more, more.

I am thinking about this because during my latest travels I read a book by George Saunders called "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life." The author uses short stories by famous 19th/20th century Russian writers to teach writing. (and reading and life I guess) One of the last stories is Chekhov's "Gooseberries" which left me thinking about the nature of work. These stories were all written before the Russian Revolution and largely describe a bourgeoisie class in need of adjusting. I found myself like Bourkin and "could not sleep for a long time" wondering if I have been "display(ing) all the properties and qualities of the free spirit" I've been given. Which reminded me of my friend and the lovely Linda F's casual relationship with what might be thought of as real jobs.

The little book is like taking a class. Or maybe surveying a class. Either way, it sticks with me. It's made a mark. I can't think of any better reason than that to recommend it to you. Give it a read.

Back in the Day

What I was thinking about last year, five years ago, and ten years ago.

• Last Year: Right FIT #491 – I'm instantly in nostalgia mode seeing a picture of myself at summer camp when I was around age 10. We are the sum of our experiences. I wonder what all those guys are up to?
• Five Years Ago: Right FIT #282 – I was focused on data quality for a project. Collecting it and making it usable. Today I'm still feeling the same way because although the LLM tools make it seem like we can take any unstructured data and make sense of it with natural language commands, it doesn't seem to be working that way. Where we have tried and true solutions for cleaning your data, use them. It makes everything better.
• Ten Years Ago: Right FIT #20 – A review of a 2x2 grid I learned from consultant Phil Symchych. It's great for working through reasons you want to do something. It's been said human beings can justify anything. With this grid, you'll be a justifying superstar!