The key, in my opinion, is how we choose to view and tell our story. When a tragedy happens, do we take it as confirmation of our own failings, or do we look for lessons that we can learn from the episode? It’s never easy and I don’t want to trivialize the emotion of the moment or the sorrow of human suffering. When we first encounter the sorrow or the fear or the hurt, we have no choice but to cope – any way we can. But once we survive the episode, when we have time to breathe, how do we talk about the event?

We have a choice.

We can view the event as part of our long tale of woe and make it so. Or we can view the event as a stepping stone that leads us onward and upward.

Sometimes, we can only see the positives when we look back over our lives. The same events that at the time were heart-stopping and deadly, in retrospect, turn out to be the very events that propelled us forward into our best moments.

In my case, my dream to be a speaker and communicator was realized when I spoke at Tedx Napa Valley in September. I got there through a series of high and lows, twists and turns, laughter and tears. I wouldn’t trade any of it for the lessons I have learned.

What about you? Do you have scars or tattoos that tell the story of your life?

When it comes to priorities, sometimes it feels like we are constantly trying to balance on a teetering see-saw with an unpredictable person on the other end.

This out of balance feeling seems to be impacting everyone lately from businesses to individuals. We are all under constant pressure to do more, to give back, to network, to Tweet, to eat slow food. We don’t want to be the lone slacker so we do more and more every day.  But we soon find ourselves doing fewer things well (and waiting a long time for our dinner).

The solution, in my opinion, is clarity. If we will individually and collectively take a rest from doing and spend a little more time contemplating, we will be in a better position to identify the things that really matter. We need a sense of purpose that helps us prioritize not only our daily activities but also our corporate goals and objectives.

At BDCo, we have gotten some great insights from thinking about and articulating our firm’s purpose, which we call our “Why” statement. The idea came from Simon Sinek’s book, Start with Why. The idea is a simple one but its power is quite amazing. Just by staying focused on those things that matter most, you start making better decisions.  It happens when you start thinking about your core beliefs and then look for others who share them.

We have seen this approach make a difference in wineries, in charitable and civic organizations, and in businesses of every sort. But it starts with each one of us as individuals. Take a few minutes to first define your personal beliefs and then think about actions you can take each day in  support of those beliefs.  How do your personal beliefs line up with those of your company? What can you do today that gives you a sense of passion?

Define your beliefs and then use them to set priorities. I believe in you. 

The theme of our retreat was communication and the exercise came from The Improv Handbook  by Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White.The idea was to  put one of the core concepts of Improvisation (the idea of “yes, and…”)  to the test using three different simulated conversations. We matched everyone in the room with a teammate and instructed each pair to plan an imaginary trip, event, or picnic. The goal was to generate as many ideas as possible during the timed exercise.

In the first exercise, we instructed each member of the pair to shoot down every idea their partner proposed. 

We gave them this example: 

Person A :” let’s go on a balloon ride in Napa.”

Person B : “oooh no, I’m afraid of heights. I don’t  like to fly in a plane much less a tiny wicker basket. How about going to a movie?”

Person A : “There’s nothing good on. I wait for movies to come out in DVD, then I can watch them on NetFlix. How about a trip to Stinson Beach? “

Each pair had three minutes to come up with ideas.

In the second exercise we instructed the pairs to work on the same outing. 

This time they were to agree with their partner’s suggestion but to do so in a grudging way:

Person A : “let’s go on a balloon ride in Napa.”

Person B: ” Um, well, those things are really expensive, but OK. I’ll up my life insurance policy so my wife and small children don’t have to suffer if something bad happens. How about a nice, safe meal at Bottega after that?”

For the third exercise, teams were again told to work on the same imaginary outing but this time they were told to enthusiastically agree with their partner’s suggestion and then build on it.

They had the same three minutes to generate ideas:

Person A: “Let’s go on a ballon outing in Napa.”

Person B: ” That sounds like a blast! While we’re up there, we can scout out wineries that we can go visit in the area. “

At the end of the third exercise, we asked the group how the different scenarios compared. The consensus was that more ideas happened when team members were able to build on their partner’s suggested activity. It was pretty obvious from the energy in the room during the middle exercise that grudging agreement does not support creative ideas. Several of the teams even ran out of steam before the three minutes were up for that scenario.

While most of us find it pretty easy to kill every suggestion our partners make, one of our team members found it  hard to do so during the first exercise. His female teammate kept coming up with great ideas so he had a hard time feigning negativity. (We plan to make her chair of our event committee.)

The group agreed that grudging acceptance was the least productive environment for generating ideas while the “yes, and…” approach which includes positive agreement and building on a suggestion makes for more creative ideas. It is interesting that even strong disagreement is easier to work with than passive, unhappy agreement. 

In your next meeting or brainstorming session, try this exercise as a way of showing participants how to help their teammates generate more ideas. And the next time someone (your spouse, co-worker, or child) comes up with an idea or suggestion, try not to be the one who squashes their creativity.

They have functions and formulas and fonts.  They offer symmetry and order – all of the things that matter to accountants. When we’re feeling creative, we can apply conditional formatting to any spreadsheet cells that deserve a little extra color. We can auto-filter our way through a massive list of details to find only the pertinent information. We can sort a list of values so  the largest dollar amounts are at the top. We can combine strings of text to make other strings and we can turn data into tables.

We can autosum to create a total that we then underline in just the correct way (single line above, double line below). We can add comments and images.  We can modify the precision of any number that we display (to add or remove decimals) and we can add a “$” whenever one is needed.

And best of all, if we make a mistake while living in our spreadsheet world, we can use the undo button.

So how might we use our new Microsoft Excel-lent Brain? Imagine being able to auto-filter all of the information you receive in the course of a day. You could just click a triangle in your brain to pull out only the positive feedback and filter out the negative. You could color code all of the really important images that pass your visual cortex so you could always locate your car keys. You could sort out the most important tasks from the meaningless ones, and keep track of your food by caloric impact. Every time you spend money, you would see the total of your expenditures in a single column with properly applied commas and decimal places.

If you say the wrong thing, you would just apply the undo button or choose not to save the file. And then there’s the autorecover feature…

To learn more about some of these Excel features and others that would be useful brain features, join us for a free “Eat and excel*” gathering on May 13th.

*The cool name for our gathering, ”eat and excel” was provided by Debi Cali at Baldacci Vineyards. I am pretty sure there were creativity-enhancing spirits involved in the creation of the title.

How it works.
Recently I found a great example of “nudging” behavior at the Napa Valley Vintners offices. We were teaching a class there and had served food and beverages. We were cleaning up the food items and went into the kitchen to throw away the trash. 

That’s when we had to make a decision – we had to choose between two different ways of disposing of our waste:

Option A – Recycle

Option B – Don’t recycle
 

Here’s what struck me about this setup — it was the words they chose on each of the bins:

Option A was to  ”Recycle” . It made you feel good to do the right thing.  

Look at the wording for Option B. They didn’t label the second bin “trash” or “garbage.” They labeled it “Landfill”. I had a visceral response to that word. I could barely force myself to put anything in that bin. Who wants to be the horrible person responsible for adding to a landfill? Your natural inclination is to avoid that bin at all costs.  The word creates a powerful visual image in your mind and motivates you to put as much as you can into the recycling bin. 

What they didn’t do
They didn’t need a single sign encouraging me to recycle. There weren’t lists of what qualifies and what doesn’t. There was no hall monitor watching to report any garbage infractions. They inspired me to do the right thing. One simple word choice made all the difference. Kudos to the smart person at the Napa Valley Vintners who took the time to think about the little things.

How can you make it easier for people to choose to do the right thing in your company?

But there are a couple of stretches on the road where I pay extra attention to my driving speed.

It has to do with these signs.

This gets my attention.

Not only do these signs get my attention, they  also cause me to change behavior. I actually try to reduce my speed to get under the posted speed limit.  I enjoy seeing the relationship between my actions (putting pedal to the metal) and the digital numbers on that sign. I am motivated by information and by the connection between my behavior and the resulting outcomes.

Compare my  response to the top sign with my response to the speed limit sign below.  

This doesn’t get my attention.

I probably don’t notice this sign.  I may glance around to see if there is actual enforcement in the area, but generally these signs don’t get me to change behavior. Potential punishment does not effectively motivate me to change behavior.

Now let’s consider what might happen if I were offered a small reward for going the speed limit or less. Do you think I would pay more attention if I passed this sign on Highway 12?

Will this sign get my attention? Will it make me change my behavior?

I may pay attention to this sign, because it’s certainly unusual. I doubt it will make me adjust my speed for long.

How would each of these different approaches work for you?

Now take these ideas and apply them to your team, your staff, and your co-workers. Which of these three methods have you applied when trying to change behavior? Most of us use either rewards or punishment to drive our teams to take certain actions. 

What if you tried giving people more immediate feedback? Tie their actions to the outcomes you are measuring. Show them how they move the needle by capturing one more e-mail address for your database, by adding one more bottle of Cabernet Sauvignion to each tasting room sale, or by connecting with one more twitter fan.  Give individual actions meaning by showing each person how they contribute to the big picture.

Motivation is not always about money. Sometimes it just takes a couple of blinking lights.

Millions of tiny details are the reason one bottle of wine scores 92 points and another scores 89.  If the world was simpler, our choices would be  black or white, on or off, true or false, and there would be no need to have 51 pages on Wikipedia devoted to shades of red.  Sometimes the difference between two choices  is hard to identify and the impact is subtle, but other times it is obvious.  Even an untrained eye can tell the difference between a glass of  wine that is  ”Candy Apple Red” and one that is ”Cerise”.

I have been struggling with one particular detail since I first began working with the team at Brotemarkle Davis. It’s their almost maniacal insistence on referring to the people we serve as “customers” instead of “clients”.  

My career began in 1982 as a staff accountant with Deloitte.  Lesson one, day one in new staff training was about removing all references to the word “customer” from my vocabulary.  The only time you were allowed to use the word “customer” was in reference to someone who was listed on a client’s Accounts Receivable Aging report. Those people who owed debts to our clients were “customers”.  We had “clients”.

And now this firm is taking the reverse approach. 

BDCo  says the term “client“ reflects a traditional CPA firm view that people and organizations represent repeat business that will automatically return year after year, regardless of the level of service they receive. Customers, on the other hand, evaluate our services every time they visit.  We have to work hard to earn the right to work with customers year after year. We want to treat people as customers rather than clients.

Because I am slow to change,  I shall keep using the wrong terminology and shall keep getting back corrected e-mails, blog posts, invites, and FaceBook entries, while everyone here continues to treat people like customers.

And the devil shall keep popping up in my copy in his favorite scarlet cape.

When it comes to financial information, we accountants  sometimes use our own special language to separate people from the information we share. It’s not intentional, it just happens when you spend all of your time immersed in a technical subject. (Ok, for some people it is intentional and for some,  intimidating others is the best part of their job.) Ever had an interesting dialogue about amortization with an accountant?

As an instructor at WISE academy, I periodically teach an 8 hour financial class to winery employees. The goal of the class is to remove the mystery from financial information by giving our students a new vocabulary. Believe it or not, at the end of the 8 hours, they use their new financial vocabulary to analyze financial statements. You would think we had a room full of accountants (without the lead pencils or 10 key).

Once you remove the language barrier, it is easier for people to ask questions and to communicate with everyone on their team.

It’s a simple enough statement. But it wasn’t clear.

At first, I was disappointed. It seemed they had a limited schedule.  But after a second, I realized they were open all week – every day but Tuesday. 

Who decided to list their open days in this fashion? And why was it hard for me to translate the days when they were presented this way? We are programmed to view a week from Sunday to Saturday, so I was required to make a mental translation in order to make sense of the information.  If I hadn’t taken that extra second, I might not have realized that the museum was open on Sunday, when I planned to visit.

So what’s the point? Words are important. Your arrangement of words when you form sentences can change their meaning. Take time to review your written word. Think before you speak. Strive to be clear when you communicate. Be efficient with your words and re-read that e-mail before you push the send button.

How many other ways could we describe the museum’s schedule ?

• “Open weekends and weekdays (except Tuesday). “
• “Open every day but Tuesdays.”
• “Open weekdays except Tuesday and all weekend.”
• Here’s how it appears on the website : “10 a.m. 5 p.m. daily, Closed Tuesdays and major holidays.”

Which one is easiest for you to understand? What about visitors from other countries, which version is easiest to translate?

We came up with 4 primary tenets: People Matter (hence our tagline), We support our community, We like what we do (even on April 14th), and We fulfill dreams. 

We were inspired by training we received from www.mentorplus.com and a video on TED by Simon Sinek. Our firm has already been talking about our passion for the wine industry and the role we play in it, but this video got us thinking specifically about  “why” we do what we do rather than our normal focus on the “what” and the “how”. 

You might think it would be hard for accountants to find meaning behind tax returns and financial statements. But our firm does much more than that.  We see our role as supporting the people of the wine industry so they are free to make magic happen all over the Napa Valley.  We might do it with calculator tape or lead pencils, Excel spreadsheets or financial forecasts, scorecards or dashboards but at its core, what we do is about helping people live their dreams. 

 If you take the time to think about what you do each day, it probably isn’t about generating revenues or earning a living, it’s hopefully about something else that goes deeper.  We tend to get too caught up in the “doing” and forget to think about the reasons that give our actions meaning.