Management Consulting News

Unleash the Potential of Booklets to Promote Your Practice, by Paulette Ensign

As we launch into a new year, many people resolve to get better organized--it's right up there with losing weight. So, to kick off 2003, we asked an expert for help. David Allen, called the "productivity guru" by Fast Company magazine and the best-selling author of Getting Things Done, explains how any consultant can get more done, with less stress.

We've also got two practical articles on publishing this month: Paulette Ensign writes about using booklets to promote your practice; and, Otto Barz comments on the print-on-demand process.

Looking back over the 2002 MCNews issues you'll see a remarkable list of interviews and articles. I'd like to thank all the authors for their contributions last year in both time and ideas. If you haven't been to the web site recently, you should check the 100+ additions to the library.

If you are a new subscriber, you should definitely visit the web site and look at our library of past MasterMind interviews and articles. As always, if you have comments, send them along to me.

"Things are only impossible until they're not."--Jean-Luc Picard, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/st-tng/)

David Allen is the author of the best selling, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and founder of the David Allen Company, a consulting, coaching and training company. He is also a frequent speaker on the topics of time and stress management, individual and team productivity and high performance work practices.

In the past twenty years, Allen has helped improve productivity for more than half a million professionals in hundreds of organizations worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies and governmental agencies.

MCNews: Getting more done, with less stress, is probably at the top of many New Year's resolution lists. What's different about your approach?

Allen: A lot of people, even with great intentions, are less than successful when they try to get themselves organized. The main reason for the high failure rate is that most people have not had a model for productivity they could trust. The approach I've written about tells you what to do with everything. You see how it actually works and that makes it a lot easier to see the payoff. You realize there will be a valuable outcome at the end of the process, rather than it being just another blind path.

MCNews: People do seem really stressed these days with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Has our world gotten that much more complicated, or is something else going on here?

Allen: There is something else going on: the frequency of having your world disrupted. You will change careers more times than your parents changed jobs. When your parents were thrown into new situations, they had an overwhelming sense of ambiguity and stress until they adapted. Then, they got to cruise for another twelve point six years.

You, on the other hand, have about two weeks to adapt to changes, and then you've got to do it again. The issues are the same, but the constant upheaval and need to recalibrate are new. The stress of change is ongoing right now. Some of that is due to more technology and globalization. One thing is certain: we are constantly in crisis mode.

But in a strange way, people relax more in crisis because it gets them focused and relieves the pressure of future crises. If you blow a tire on the freeway, you roll up your sleeves and focus on that crisis. You aren't thinking about that staff problem you haven't figured out, or the kids at camp, or whether you need a new investment advisor.

The real stress comes when you take away the immediate crisis and the next level of stress that's been sublimated bubbles to the surface. It's the sublimated stress that burns people out.

Allen: Think about what happens when you need to complete some task. If you can't finish it right when you think of it and you don't park it in some trusted place outside your head, it creates an infinite amount of stress for you.

The reason is that the place in our heads where we file stuff has no sense of past or future. So, as soon as you file two things in your head without an objective system to track them, some part of you thinks you should be doing both of them at the same time. That builds subliminal stress, which is what drains our energy.

MCNews: So, the first step to stress-free productivity is to get the "stuff" out of our heads?

Allen: Yes. Of the five stages for managing the flow of work, the first and primary is to make sure you've got all of your potential commitments in a place where they are easily retrievable. Your head is a major source of leaks because an item is virtually lost as soon as you file it in there, just as it's lost if you put it on a post-it that gets stuck somewhere you won't look.

All your commitments must be captured and tracked in some way. At the very least, you need to throw them into temporary buckets, like your paper in-basket. But, of course, the buckets--whether it's voicemail, email, recording devices or your in-basket--have to be emptied, processed and organized, sooner rather than later. Otherwise, the stuff crawls right back up into your head.

MCNews: What's the next step once you have emptied the commitments from your head and elsewhere?

Allen: Well, once you have collected it all, either on a list, on scraps of paper or have recorded everything somewhere, you need to go through each item one at a time and make the processing decisions about it. Is it actionable, yes or no? If it's actionable, you decide what the next action should be. Then, you decide if you should do it, delegate it or defer it. That is the thinking that needs to be done about every potential item of work that we generate ourselves or that we collect from other people.

You know intuitively that there is something important about distributing your cognition and getting stuff out of your head so you can be more objective. But most people only note enough to remind them about the work at hand; they don't finish defining what that work is.

Quite simply, the way you get things done is you define what done means, and you define what doing looks like. Because, guess what? Most people have not made those two decisions about most everything that demands their attention.

You have to sit down and ask, okay what am I trying to do about this staff situation or about this client presentation? You've got to define what you are trying to accomplish, and then you have to decide what, exactly, is the very next physical thing that needs to happen. Until you decide what to do next, your brain will keep bothering you about it.

You must decide what doing looks like, whether that next step is yours to take or somebody else's. Until you actually get it down to that level, your brain keeps running this loop: got to decide, got to decide, hey, I got to decide, bother, bother. Most people have just lived in that mode constantly since they have been conscious, so they don't even know there is another way. The key is making the operational decisions about what doing would look on each item.

The whole point of making decisions and defining your work as best as you can is that the work keeps coming at you. You need to look at the predefined work against the ad hoc stuff to make a professional triage call and not get snared in the busy trap, just dealing with the latest and loudest because you can't think about the rest.

MCNews: Many people use to-do lists, and would probably say they work okay. What do you think about the effectiveness of the traditional to-do list?

Allen: It depends on what you mean by a to-do list. My lists are ultimately to-do lists because they define what doing is. But, what most people call a to-do list is incomplete and unclear, which is highly unattractive. Everything on your list is either attracting or repelling you psychologically. There is no neutral response: it's either, oh boy, when can I mark that off or, get out of my face. If there are still a lot of decisions you need to make about items on your list, your brain glances at the list and says, I don't have the energy to do all that thinking, go away.

You don't usually see specific actions on to-do lists because most people haven't forced themselves to sit down and finish their thinking about what has their attention. They collect items in their in-basket or think they have made a list, but there is another level of thinking that is required to move forward.

Another problem with to-do lists is that people try to do all five phases of the workflow process at once. They get their back up against the wall and feel stressed. So they try to collect everything they need to do, process, organize, review and make priority decisions about the whole thing all at once. You can blow a fuse trying to do that.

It does relieve pressure temporarily to know you need to do "something" about an item, but that approach does not get your energy positively engaged to be productive. So, back to your question on to-do lists: no, they don't usually work the way most people use them. Daily to-do lists haven't worked since the telephone was invented.

MCNews: There is no shortage of tools and techniques, like planners and PDA's to help people get a handle on the stress in their lives. Do you think such tools work?

Allen: They don't work any better than a knife works. It's all in how you use it, right? Tools are static. They don't get you organized, make decisions for you, or teach you how to think. They can facilitate thinking a little bit because your mind, to some degree, works in a function-follows-form fashion. In other words, give yourself a blank page and your brain wants to fill it up because it can't stand a vacuum. So, as long as you create the right forms, tools can facilitate thinking.

The point is that tools are critical, but before a tool can really work for you, there needs to be an understanding of how we think. What's different about my approach is that it is based on our thinking algorithm, not just a set of organizing tools.

MCNews: How much time does it take to do the kind of thinking you are talking about?

Allen: The executive thinking needed to process input from your in-basket, email, notes, etc., takes from thirty minutes to one and a half hours a day for the typical professional. You could be working off your list, dealing with the phone calls you didn't expect or processing your email. Those are three very different activities, and you can't do them at the same time. People get upset when they are not getting their to-do lists done, but the truth is that most people are relatively unconscious about all of the things that are coming at them and how sophisticated their lives are.

Most people just haven't trained themselves to sit down and do the kind of thinking on the front end that would allow them to manage their commitments in a complete way. It doesn't get rid of your problems, but it does elevate them to a level where they can be managed.

MCNews: When you start to work with someone, what is the most common improvement you see right away?

Allen: Getting it all out of the head and into a trusted bucket, and then making the operational, executive decisions. Most people are doing that to some degree, but there is a light-year difference between getting it all and getting a lot. It can feel worse to get a lot, because you don't know where the end is--you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Then, whatever system you are using is not giving you the payoff, which is to relieve the brain from the lower level tasks of remembering and reminding. The certificate or degree you get from doing it completely is that your brain graduates to a higher level where you get to make intuitive choices from your options. Used properly, an external system manages lower level tasking much better than your brain can anyway.

Until you empty your brain completely and organize and process everything that was in there, it's almost not worth doing at all. Maybe I'm getting old and cranky, but I think if you are not willing to get it all down, don't do any of it. Otherwise, you are just giving yourself something else to do that you aren't going to feel good about.

Allen: The good and bad news about my approach is that it's a transformational way to think about your life, and once you do the hard work, suddenly you start to see the fog lift. But, implementing my method is far outside most people's comfort zone. They start the process, feel fabulous and then they back off because they can only handle so much fabulous feeling.

People's addiction to stress is the biggest barrier to truly getting organized. You start to feel good and excited, but you can handle only so much of that before some part of you unconsciously slacks off and lets the world fall apart again to get you back to the level of stress to which you are addicted.

And, here's the pain: this is not light-weight information; once you do get organized, there are a whole lot of people who are going to start upsetting you who never upset you before. Once you raise your standards, you start noticing behavior you never noticed before: people not asking what the next action is, or nodding and saying they got it without writing anything down. And, you're thinking, well that went into a black hole.

Allen: Two books, actually. The first should be out by the end of 2003. The book is based on the underlying principles and dynamics that lie behind the best practices of personal productivity--everything that we could all do more of, and be more aware of (other than work harder!) that makes things function better in life and work. The next book is related to a seminar I do called "Leveraging Focus in Vision," and is about the magic that happens when you start to image things and how that affects perception and performance.

MCNews: We will be watching for them. Thanks for being so generous with your time.

Find out more about David Allen, his services and his e-newsletter at www.davidco.com.

Unleash the Potential of Booklets to Promote Your Practice, by Paulette Ensign

As a management consultant, you are an expert. And, you are eager to share your expertise with as many people as possible. Writing a book may have crossed your mind, but who has time for that? Instead, consider writing informational booklets in a format that conveys your valuable insights with a lot less effort on your part.

Writing booklets takes much less time, money, and stress than writing a full-length book, and can bring as many, or more, benefits. If you have already written a book, you might want to divide it into booklets and make more money from the parts than you would from the whole.

Booklets are best written in short action steps, giving readers a jump-start on your topic with concrete information. The best length for a booklet is sixteen to twenty-four pages.

Author status from a booklet opens many doors for you and your practice, including:

-Speaking engagements
-Sales of your services and any products you have
-Radio, television, airline, online, and print interviews
-Large quantity booklet sales
-Leveraging the booklet contents to other formats
-Joint sales/marketing ventures

As readers experience success and satisfaction from what they read in your booklet, your credibility increases. They want more of you and more of what you are about. The booklet gives them an opportunity to test drive you if they have not already utilized your services, or to reinforce whatever they learned from you when they worked with you.

A booklet is both a profit center and a marketing tool. Every time you sell a copy of your booklet, it brings in direct revenue and, at the same time, promotes you to a larger audience.

Every person who reads your booklet is a ready-made marketing representative for you and your practice. A single-copy buyer could be a decision-maker for a company that buys more copies of your booklet. Companies that purchase a large quantity of your booklets as a promotional tool for their own purposes will promote you with each and every booklet they distribute. They have paid you to promote you. Life doesn't get a whole lot better than that!

A reader may also be or know a reporter or producer who could schedule you for an interview. Or, a reader might have contacts in your community with an interest in licensing your booklet in another language or a different physical format. You may be just the person to consult on an issue. Or a reader may need a series of speeches in different locations or departments within an organization. Any of that and more can and does happen from a booklet.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to how a booklet can serve your consulting practice. Write on the topic you enjoy most and that is the most lucrative for your practice. Give people a choice of the booklet, your services, or both when they are in buying mode. Some may want to purchase the booklet first and hire your services later; others may buy both product and service at the same time. Everyone benefits either way.

What will your first booklet be?

Paulette Ensign has sold over 500,000 copies of her own tips booklet, 110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life. She is the Founder and CEO of Tips Products International. Contact her
at Paulette@tipsbooklets.com or visit www.tipsbooklets.com.

* * * *

MCNews Travel Advisory

Beginning January 1, 2003, new security rules will make flying from US airports a little tougher, and slower, for everyone. Security procedures at over 400 commercial airports in the US are being enhanced to include screening checked luggage for explosives. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), formed after the September 11 World Trade Center bombing, is supervising the task of screening approximately 1.5 billion pieces of luggage checked annually at US airports. Here's a link to some tips for making the new procedures a little easier on you.

Over the last year or so, there's been confusion over what you can and cannot bring onto a commercial airplane. To help you, we combed through the TSA security rules and pulled together a handy pocket summary you can carry anywhere.

--------------------------Clip and Save - Airport Security Procedures------------------------

Things You Can Take in Carry-On Luggage

Nail Clippers and Nail Files
Corkscrews
Knitting and Crochet Needles
Tweezers
Cigar Cutters
Safety Razors
Scissors - plastic or metal with blunt tips

Things You Can't Take On Board, but You Can Put in Checked Luggage

Ice Picks
Meat Cleavers
Swords
Cattle Prods
Brass Knuckles
Billy Clubs
Stun Guns

Things You Can't Take on Board or in Checked Luggage--you'll have to get these items at the hotel gift shop

Blasting Caps
Hand Grenades
Plastic Explosives
Gasoline
Dynamite
Tear Gas

Source: Transportation Security Administration

--------------------------Clip and Save - Airport Security Procedures------------------------

Have you written a book? Does one of your clients need information published? There are now a number of Print-on-Demand (POD) publishers who will, for a modest fee, prepare your text in fully professional book format, including editing, if that's desired, and publish it. The book will look like any other book you've ever held in your hands, replete with four-color slick cover and professionally designed and typeset pages.

It will have all it needs for the marketplace, too: ISBN number, Library of Congress number and barcode; you will find a picture of its cover on Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Borders.com and other website sellers; and, it will appear in Books in Print, where bookstores go to find any book that's published in the United States. Buying your book isn't a special effort for the stock purchaser at the bookstore either, because many POD publishers make their books available through Ingram, the country's largest book wholesaler, where virtually all bookstores purchase wholesale all the time.

What makes POD publishers different from traditional publishers? Books are printed and bound one at a time, and shipped within forty-eight hours of ordering! There's no need to fund inventory. New publishing technologies make it feasible to wait until a book is ordered and paid for before manufacturing it. One can appreciate the savings in not having to invest in inventory and its management.

Surprisingly, POD manufacturing is only a little more costly than printing and binding in large volume. The savings gained in the absence of inventory and warehousing costs permit POD publishers to sell books at prices competitive to those produced by conventional means.

Traditional publishers have been slammed in the last few decades for not properly serving "midlist" authors--those whose books will sell only a few thousand copies. Traditional publishers generally reserve ten percent of the list price of the book for publicity, promotion, and advertising. For a $19.95 book that's projected to sell 2000 copies in its lifetime, roughly $4,000 would be spent on publicity, advertising, and promotion. Is it a surprise that the prophecy is fulfilled, and only 2000 copies really end up being sold?

The publisher also knows that if it spends only half of that budgeted amount, there will probably be no measurable difference in sales. So, it diverts money into campaigns for the few books on its list where market penetration can be affected. These, of course, are generally pre-sold, high-potential, "name-brand" books or authors. This makes good business sense, and is good for a few authors. But, it's no use at all to the vast majority of authors whose books are not big sellers.

There's no magic in POD except to enable a new philosophy of publishing and a more rational, more productive way to deploy funds. Some POD publishers spend virtually no money in promoting sales for its authors and, instead, give authors more in royalties.

The net result of the savings in inventory and marketing costs and the new technologies enable a new approach for book publishing. Competently written books, even if they don't match market formulas, can now reach the marketplace and serve small but interested groups of readers.

Otto Barz is president of Publishing Synthesis, Ltd. (http://www.pubsyn.com), which has edited and typeset books for traditional publishers since 1975, and president of YBK Publishers, Inc. (http://www.yourbookpublisher.com), which was established in 1999.

Mr. Barz will co-present on the topic of POD publishing at the Thursday, January 9, 2003 meeting of the New York City Chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC). His co-presenter will be Roger Kropf, New York University professor and author of the book After E-mail.

As background, I run a small turnaround and crisis management firm that advises troubled companies, their owners and creditors. Too frequently, the marketing muscle in the firm (me) is asked to run the job. I want to market more and consult less.

What are some tips on how to avoid clients demanding the boss' (read my) heavy involvement in every project?"

If you have ever considered using internet discussion lists as a marketing tool, you must read Mark Brownlow's free sixty-six page special report. His unique report shows you how to plan, prepare and publish effective and ethical contributions to email discussion lists, promoting you and your practice.

Topics include finding and evaluating lists, preparing and publishing posts, and tracking the results. The report includes two bonus sections: a collection of special tips and tricks, and a list of useful online resources.

On January 18, 1644, perplexed Pilgrims in Boston reported America's first UFO sighting. Apparently Earth has been a popular alien vacation destination for a long time.

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809. Poe is best remembered for his poetry and tales of suspense. He is acknowledged as the father of the detective story, hence the Edgar Allan Poe Awards (the Edgar's) that are bestowed each year for achievement in the mystery field.

January 27 is Thomas Crapper Day. Mr. Crapper is known for perfecting the flush toilet. In 1861, he founded Thomas Crapper & Company in London, and patented a flush toilet with a separate water tank and a pull chain. During WWI, American soldiers passing through England saw "T. Crapper-Chelsea" printed on toilet tanks, and coined the slang "crapper" to mean toilet.
[http://www.theplumber.com/crapper.htm

National Speakers Association - The popular NSA winter workshops for professional speakers, consultants, authors and others are scheduled for January and February 2003. For information, click here (https://www.nsaspeaker.org/meetings/index.xpl).

Consultancy Skills Training - Provides consultancy and training, in Europe and the US, to organizations and people who wish to develop their client engagement performance. For information, United States (http://www.consultingskills.net/), Europe (http://www.cst-ltd.co.uk).

The Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) has chapters and events around the world. Check the samples below for upcoming events.

Institute of Management Consultants - "Shaping the Future" IMC USA National Conference will be held on May 4-6, 2003 in Chicago, Illinois. For information, click here (http://www.imcusa.org).

IMC New York City Chapter - Thursday January 9, 2002, Otto Barz, president of Publishing Synthesis, Ltd, and Roger Kropf, New York University professor and author of the book After E-mail, will co-present on the topic of On-Demand Publishing. More information is available at http://www.imcusa.org or by contacting Sean Dougherty, vice president, publicity, at 201-739-2541 or at sdougher@mww.com.

IMC USA Chapter Meetings - IMC chapters across the US have regularly scheduled events for members and guests. Find an event in your area by clicking here (http://www.imcusa.org).

Canadian Association of Management Consultants - To find out about educational events scheduled in Canada, click here (http://www.camc.com/chapterevents.asp).

Institute of Management Consultancy United Kingdom - Click here to review IMC events planned in the UK. (http://www.imc.co.uk/news/events/events.php).

Institute of Management Consultants Hong Kong - Click here to review IMC events planned in Hong Kong (http://www.imchk.com.hk/2002/4_1.htm).

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." - Winston Churchill

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